Reclaiming the Night

If you sleep really well, there are two things to immediately realize.  Number one, your capacity to sleep is greatly envied by many, especially me, in this early morning moment.  Number two, you must read on.  I suspect some benefit might exist in these lines for you.  And, if you do have sleep issues, come right on in to our shared experience.

Many years ago my mother said to me, “Oh, the women in our family have sleep issues.”  I found myself ducking out of the way, trying to avoid this energetic whammy.  Well, of course it wasn’t an intentional maternal whammy.  My mom was the ultimate of mother-bears; she would protect me with her every cell, as she continues to do well past her life in a body.  She was simply speaking the truth of my genetic inheritance.

I understand enough about epigenetics to know that I can re-pattern my genes.  They do not bind me to inherited traits. But I swear to you, dear BlogFriends, as I age (oh, and I do), sleep, that wild and wonderful doorway out of awakened consciousness, sneakily and consistently evades me. Don’t even ask what time it is right now.

I am an instant-faller-asleep-er.  Within a few minutes in bed, I slide away.  That is the good and easy part of sleep.  It’s the WAKING UP that gets much less easy.  (I’m capitalizing to keep myself awake.)  I wake many times during the evening.  Sometimes I am able to glide back into easy sleep and or even soften into resting awake-ness by using relaxation techniques, breathing, or prayer.  Yet often, I cannot find the willingness to do this.  I choose the struggle.  Then, perhaps about 4:30 or 5:00 a.m., I slide into some restless dreaming for an hour or so.  I awake, exhausted and weary from the great sleep wars.

The holistic and not-so-holistic responses I have made, over the years to my sleep issues, not in any order of preference or sequence: every possible natural sleep formula, combinations of every possible natural sleep formula, liquid time-release melatonin drops, glasses to filter out the light of television and computer (fondly called bug-glasses in our family), sleep workshops, Benadryl, 5-HTP, natural remedies to reduce cortisol, natural remedies to increase cortisol, lifestyle change, noise reduction machines, the best earplugs made by God, and so on. Ad infinitum.

What I Have Learned in the Middle of the Many A-Night, Wide-Eyed and Awake:

• Probably I will not die the next day from lack of sleep.
• I may even be more effective at work, since my defenses will be weakened and my authenticity more available.
• Nights are long.  Many minutes fill up a night.  For those of you who sleep through, look what you are missing!
• I can relax into not sleeping. This is a profound insight and powerful life practice.
• Sometimes I just don’t want to relax and pray.  And—so what?  That, too, is okay.
• Sometimes I participate in my own oppressive awaken-state.  And—so what?  Yep, that’s okay, too.
• I have a choice about what I make sleeplessness mean.

Like with every single other thing on the planet, whatever is happening, sleep or no sleep, I can relax and let it be okay.  I do not drive heavy equipment for a living.  Being tired doesn’t put me in immediate danger.  Yes, in the long term, there are serious implications to sleep deficit.  But for today, if I practice relaxing, remember that resting counts, too, and just allow my reaction be what it is, I can soften into the night, and make my way ease-fully to morning.  The sleep war is a choice.

Rest well, everybody!

On the Wings of Grace

I woke into the heavy darkness of what wasn’t happening.  Like a thick film, disappointment instantly coated me.  The clock mocked me with its message of 3:08.  Often when I wake early I can slide through that blessed doorway back into sleep or prayer or easy relaxation.  Not all the time. This morning was a not-all-the time experience.  The clock and I together crept toward the half hour, then the hour.  Each passing moment laid heavier and heavier yet in my heart.  “All that work—it isn’t going to happen–who will I be without this?”  My increasing mental chatter cancelled out any possibility of salvaging; no rest was in sight.  I steeled myself for the long haul toward 5:30, my legitimate getting out of bed time.  Fumbling through my morning practices—walking, praying, yoga/light, easy meditation—I could find no solace.  No solace was to be found on this, the not-all-the-time morning.

By the time I found myself driving to work, I had dug a deep hole of disappointment in which I sat, committed to the narrative of my own defeat.  Without knowing it, my mantra had become, “It isn’t going to work.  It isn’t going to work.”  The ache in me was deep.  As I turned the corner to come onto Swamp Road, instantly everything changed.  There, high, high in the tree, right near where we had seen her before, sat the red-tailed hawk.  My heart jumped.  As I breathed her in, her message flooded me—there is a bigger picture perspective!  As she gazed at faraway sights, faraway opportunities for prey, somehow my tiny perspective, hyper-focused on this particular moment that was not meeting my standards, released.  I hadn’t imagined the possibility of a bigger picture.  Truly who knows what might happen in a week, in a month?  I was literally released by awe.

Driving slowly away, I smiled to myself. She, that beautiful hawk, was such a healer, such a messenger. I felt flooded with gratitude for the shift she offered me.  The morning light on the land was soft and opening, as were the feelings in my belly.  I continued my twelve minute trek to work.  Driving up and around the ridge, just a few minutes later, sitting on a wire that crossed the road, directly facing me was a stunning white owl!  I drove right under her and absorbed her blessing, her reminder: you are equipped and you are able.  My breath caught.  A day of double benedictions, feathered messengers blessing my path.

I am equipped and I am able.  And there is a bigger perspective here, one I cannot yet see.  More will be revealed and clearly, my guardian avian angels have my back.  I have all I need to move forward, just one step at a time.

So many messengers, so many blessings surround us. We are not alone.  How can we continue to keep our eyes and hearts open to the possibilities that emerge when we partner with the natural world?  What might this possibility look like in your life today?

Those Damn Toxic Cantaloupes

When I was a child, my mother’s consistent response to my ailments, be they sore throats, colds, or tummy aches, was something like, “What was your role in this?”.   Usually, with some maternal prodding, it was revealed that I had violated some basic law of self-protection; I had created the circumstances in which sick happened to me. Often, too, this misstep of life took the form of that crime against humanity, that deadly offense of going outside with wet hair. In the 1950’s, this scourge was the potential undoing of the human race as we know it. Surely we would all perish through the plague of wet hair.

As I write this, however, I find myself questioning my memory here. Really? Did my mother really say, “Okay, you tiny child, how did you make yourself sick?”. Perhaps not literally, yet this was clearly the paradigm in which we lived, the air that I breathed. Being ultimately responsibility for the turnings and twistings of the planet was the burden of my childhood. This ultimate responsibility without personal agency equals an exhausting and ineffective way to life. Have you noticed?

During this past week, I injured my back. It was my annual, lower- back-from-hell-experience. Walking and sitting were fine—getting from one to the other was not. Within those days of pain and exile from life as I know it, I found myself anxiously reviewing events of the previous days: what did I do? Did I not stretch after racquetball? Did I not spend enough time on the mat? Midway through the third day of this inquisition, I noticed the anxiety I was causing myself. This was surely a non-effective response to injury. I wasn’t attending to myself compassionately—I was, in fact, making myself feel worse. I then remembered: figuring it out is not a spiritual practice.

Yes, of course, we are responsible for our own well-being. Yes, of course, attending to the pillars of self-care keeps us balanced and connected. And yet sometimes, we just get sick. Sometimes we go to the supermarket and touch a cantaloupe that somebody sneezed on. That’s all—a sneezed upon cantaloupe. The partnership we hold with life, the interface between actions of self-care and then essential surrender to what is, that is the arena in which living yoga, the ancient practices of mindful presence, have much to teach us. Do your best and let go of the results! Having the agency to choose self-care, to commit to balance and consistency with food, movement, sleep and stress reduction, is clearly the practice to support life in a body, since lifestyle is both the problem and lifestyle is the solution. Yet, right relationship to reality, that is the door to real ease and skillful living.

No Kidding

The Bible, that great repository of accumulated wisdom, teaches us much but not necessarily from a body-centered perspective.  We would need to look further east for that paradigm to emerge.  However, there is one line from the Bible that I believe is rooted in a bodily perspective.  The great and ever-popular line, “It came to pass”, has much to teach us about life inside a body.

As sensations build, we so often find ways to hop off the wave, interrupting the organic process of integration, the moving of feelings through the body/mind.  Because we are, in general, so unused to having sensations in our body, we find so many ways off that wave of integration.  Some of my favorites are—and not in order of preference—overwork, blaming others for my feelings, worry (the national Jewish pastime—as a Jewish woman I am qualified here to comment), and, everybody’s favorite, Netflix Streaming.  There is nothing, nada, zippo, wrong with any of these things, but when they habitually check me out of the moment, rather than keep me present for the process of integration, I’m interrupting the brilliance of my own body and cutting short the natural process of releasing feelings.  Feelings that are not released live in the body/mind.  Yes, folks, the issues do live in the tissues.

So what do we do?  How do we keep present in the moment?  The most profound tool of all lives inside of you, us—all, available in any moment.  THE BREATH.  Breathing shifts us out of the sympathetic nervous system, that place of “fight—flight—freeze” and, through the vegus nerve, moves us into the parasympathetic nervous system, or “rest—and—digest”.  It doesn’t get any better than breath for returning to the wave of sensation, for checking back into the moment.

So, friends, when the shit hits the fan, and it will (that is truly life’s guarantee as well as its job), breathe.  Breathe and relax.  The feelings really are coming to pass—they are not coming to stay.  Our bodies know how.  Practice using your breath as a supportive and powerfully effective tool of presence.  It’s only, well (forgive me for this) one breath away.

Zacy Practicing the “Nobility of Retreat”

In my world, this has been a truly huge week.  Leading the five day immersion program, Integrative Weight Loss, at Kripalu, and being fully there for it, juggling some of my own dear coaching clients, showing up for the second evening webinar on codependency, (getting over the horrifying edge of watching myself in that little Skype-like box, pale white with twitching, beady eyes), while keeping my mind in the arena of my book proposal—all have left me a little thinned out, just this side of annoyed.  Each thread of the week was rich and full of possibilities for connection and relaxed practice.  I would change nothing about it, feel profoundly satisfied with my participation in all of it, and appreciate the blessings these gifts have bestowed upon me.  Yet…..even if it’s all good stuff, it’s too much.  It’s just too much stuff.

Clarissa Pinkola Estes, PhD, the brilliant scholar, psychoanalyst, and cantadora (keeper of the old stories in the Latina tradition) asks us to consider how we participate in our own oppression.  Of this, I am clear!  I participate in my own oppression by over-scheduling myself professionally while underestimating the impact these commitments will have upon me.  I am the only one doing this; there is no external force here driving my schedule.  That would be me; I am the internal problem.

I feel emptied out.

I am emptied out.

Does anybody out there identify?  I imagine that, on a Friday night, I am not the only one experiencing this.

Swami Kripalu taught about “the nobility of retreat”. To mindfully unplug, to turn down the flames of connection, to shirk the tyranny of scheduling, to have more space and time to stretch out into daily routines, these are my choices this weekend.  Thanks, Swami K.  Your many-decades-old teaching is the prescription for me, right here and right now.

I am off to Netflix Streaming…….

Anybody joining me?