Being with Dying

In being with dying, we arrive at a natural crucible of what it means to love and be loved. And we can ask ourselves this: Knowing that death is inevitable, what is most precious today? ~Roshi Joan Halifax

It seems to me that loss came early in my life: my father when I was just 14, then my mother and two of my closest friends before I turned 50. I remembered Richard in a previous post (and have now added a photo).

Today I’m thinking of someone I knew for a relatively short time, but who meant a lot to me. This is for Mary Beth.

Samhain

On a night of drinking and dancing
in a smoky Albuquerque bar,
you laughed and said
I made you feel secure.

But there was no protection
from disease that defeated you,
that made you lie down
in the bed of your pick-up truck–

a closed garage, a vacuum cleaner hose,
a note to your friends.
How like you to absolve us:
“I do not feel lonely.”

When the news came, I understood suddenly
that your last phone call–
cheerfulness strained through tears–
had been your good-bye.

I want to believe that your soul
passed easily through the thinned veil
on that Samhain night, to know
that you are dancing once again.

Gratefulness

Happy Thanksgiving weekend!

I shared some favorite quotations on gratitude here. To those I add the following:

Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it. ~William Arthur Ward

I’ve learned from experience that the greater part of our happiness or misery depends on our dispositions and not on our circumstances. ~Martha Washington

When we give cheerfully and accept gratefully, everyone is blessed. ~Maya Angelou

I believe gratitude breeds generosity and is an important element of happiness. Do you have a favorite quote that reminds you to be grateful?

Goals Are Not Intentions

In choosing to live with right intention…you are connecting to your own sense of kindness and innate dignity. Standing on this ground of intention, you are then able to participate as you choose in life’s contests, until you outgrow them. ~Phillip Moffitt

Today, this Yoga Journal article, “The Heart’s Intention”, was exactly what I needed. Moffitt draws the distinction between goals, which are oriented toward a future outcome, and intention, which is “a path or practice that is focused on how you are ‘being’ in the present moment.”

Moffitt says “You set your intentions based on understanding what matters most to you and make a commitment to align your worldly actions with your inner values.” Intention, unlike goals, results in integrity, unity, self-respect and peace of mind.

We clearly need goals to help us be effective and move forward in our endeavors. But Moffitt reminds us that goals are inadequate for measuring our success in life. Staying attuned to our heart’s intention (not that of the rational mind) is what Moffitt calls coming home to ourselves.

Of course, we can never do this perfectly. But Moffitt assures us that “each time you start over by reconnecting to your intention, you are taking one more step toward finding your own authenticity and freedom.”

And so the theme is practice, not perfection, again.

Mindful Health

Our life is what our thoughts make it. ~Marcus Aurelius

The attainment of wholeness requires one to stake one’s whole being. Nothing less will do…. ~C. G. Jung

Synchronicity again. I first ran across psychologist Ellen Langer when I was preparing for the talk on mindful management last month. Langer did early experiments in mindfulness and its effect on aging, so I hunted down her 1989 book, Mindfulness, and read it recently. Today I see that she has a new book, Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility, and that a movie with Jennifer Aniston, based on the book, will soon be coming out. No doubt, mindfulness is becoming more mainstream.

Langer says we have learned to influence health “by exchanging unhealthy mindsets for healthy ones and increasing a generally mindful state. The latter is more lasting and results in more personal control.” Jon Kabat-Zinn lists seven attitudinal factors that underlie mindfulness: (1) non-judging; (2) patience; (3) beginner’s mind; (4) trust; (5) non-striving; (6) acceptance; and (7) letting go. Cultivating these attitudes, Kabat-Zinn stresses, requires energy, motivation and commitment. May I establish daily practice in mindfulness for health.

Here I Am

You always have to be working on something because you have to trust your unconscious life, to be ready to deal with a play [poem] when it says, ‘Here I am.’ ~John Guare

This afternoon I will read, along with other Stonepile Writers Group members, at the Dahlonega Literary Festival. It would be lovely to have a new poem to read, but my last one was written several months ago. Today’s quote is a reminder to myself to get busy working on something. Nothing has said “Here I am” in some time, and I believe that is because I have not sat still enough.

Today I renew my intention to build in time for reception and gestation of images, the attunement to the senses, the mindfulness that often eludes me, crowded out by busyness. I think I will have to schedule this time, as paradoxical as that sounds, to put it on my calendar as sacred time. I am on vacation this week, so it seems like the ideal time to practice this intention.

How do you get yourself to a place where you can manifest your talents, where you are in “flow,” ready to receive that which calls to you, “Here I am?”

The Myth of Multitasking

To do two things at once is to do neither. ~Publilius Syrus

As I read Patti Digh’s Life is a Verb, try syncing my ipod once again (still can’t figure out what’s wrong with it), and check my Email, I run across today’s quote (p. 186 in Digh’s book) and am reminded that I often say that multitasking is a myth. Splitting our attention among tasks likely means that we are not fully present for any of them. But even if we are, it means that our energy and time leaks away during the shifts in our attention.

Edward Hallowell, in his book, Crazy Busy, says, “It is fine to believe that multitasking is a skill necessary in the modern world, but to believe it is an equivalent substitute for single-minded focus on one task is incorrect. It may be convenient or necessary to multitask…however, you will not be doing any of these tasks as effectively as you would if you were doing them one at a time.” Hah–now I have Crazy Busy perched on top of Life is A Verb, and I am blogging in addition to the rest…how easy it is to practice this way of living!

I am putting down Crazy Busy. I am unplugging my ipod to troubleshoot another day. I am closing out my blog entry. Now, I will sit back in my reading chair and finish Life is a Verb like the good unitasker I aspire to be.

Soul Time

This is one of the best daily meditations. Sit and allow action directives to come from the Greater Intelligence and bring them into your own lives. To maintain your own inner health, you need to become stewards of your own time.

While you have to work and earn a living and need to interact with the engine that drives commodity time, don’t take up your residence in that pressure tank.

Your home and soul time is organic, regulated by heartbeat, breath, sun, moon, the seasons, and the tides.~Zalman M. Schachter-Shalomi, “Take This to Heart”(Graduation Address at the Naropa University, May 8, 2004), in Living the Questions: Essays Inspired by the Work and Life of Parker J. Palmer (Sam M. Intrator, ed.)

How many of us are even aware of our heartbeats, our breath, the sun, moon, seasons and tides? This morning I am feasting my eyes on the brilliant gold-orange maple outside my window, struck by sun rays, aflame. Sometimes these things just rise up and demand our attention. But I want to notice even the subtle shifts. To learn to be a steward of soul time. How about you?

Calder, Results, and the Great Northwest

Confidence, like art, never comes from having all the answers; it comes from being open to all the questions. ~Earl Gray Stevens

Greetings! I have just returned from the Public Library Association’s “Results Boot Camp” in Seattle. Intensive Library Management Training. Planning, implementing, managing, staffing, allocating resources, and measuring for results. What a great week!

The content and instructors (June Garcia and Sandra Nelson) were intellectually stimulating, the food was fabulous (lots of nuts, fruit, veggies), and I was able to stay relatively present and energetic throughout. This is not always easy for an introvert in an intense social situation!

Friday afternoon I walked from the hotel to the Seattle Art Museum to see an Andrew Wyeth exhibit of Helga paintings. To my delight, there was also a Calder exhibit. I could’ve hung out for hours under and around the mobiles and stabiles.

Seattle was lovely. The people are more laid back than east-coast folks; there is coffee everywhere; they were flinging fish at the market. (And, yes, some of those guys in the video still work there!) Even walking through the soft rain to the museum seemed just right.

Although I am glad to be back home, I am also glad to have had the experience. And happy to be back writing here after some time away.

Mindful Management

In October, I will be giving a one-hour presentation at the state library association conference on “Mindful Management.” I selected this topic because I wanted to learn what had been written about mindfulness as it pertains to management and leadership in organizations. I selected it because I want to practice more mindful management. And we all know that the best way to learn something is to have to teach it!

Here are some of the quotes and ideas I plan to share in this workshop:

Mindfulness is the process of deliberately paying attention to the present moment in a non-jundgmental way. ~Jon Kabat-Zinn
Michael Carroll, in his book, Awake at Work, encourages us to see things as they are, not as we would like them to be, to welcome whatever our work presents to us.

According to psychologist Ellen Langer, mindfulness is a habitual state of mind in which old schemes are continually reexamined and redefined…Mindfulness includes openness to multiple points of view, and a focus on process rather than outcome. ~Charles R. Schwenk
Dropping our identification with self, we can become open to others’ ways of seeing things.

Before you speak, it’s a good idea to ask yourself these questions: (1) is it true? (2) is it kind? (3) is it necessary? Will it improve the silence?

Power stress means subordinating everything to your own wants and needs. Compassion involves understanding others and acting to address their needs…For the leader feeling the effects of power stress, the place to start is by courageously asking a few basic questions: What am I doing here? What am I out to accomplish? Is this what I want in life? Am I being true to myself? Am I happy? ~Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee

STOP:
S top what you are doing.
T ake a conscious breath.
O bserve your bodily sensations.
P roceed with whatever you were doing.

Through purposeful, conscious direction of our attention, we are able to see things that might normally pass right by us, giving us access to deeper insight, wisdom and choices. ~Boyatzis and McKee

By working on ourselves, by coming to know ourselves better, and then by sharing our growing strength with others, we create a base of support that helps to make our lives, and the world, a better place to be. ~Tarthang Tulku

Have you ever had a manager you would consider to be mindful? What are your thoughts on mindful management?

Remembering Richard

Berkeley Lake House

Cardinals flick sunflower seeds
From the blue pottery;
A pine warbler, olive as ocean,
Balances on a leaf stalk.
From the kitchen we watch
For purple finches,
And the great blue heron
Is still as ice in the cove.

The new house tour
Includes a horsehead sketch,
A toothpick railroad trestle,
Long-eared rabbits.
We laugh at random pastel tile
In the tiny shower stall
And exclaim at the growth of angelfish
Raised from eggs.

Draped in black,
Your delicate daughter
Stands on a chair
To break the eggs for dinner.
Later, when she is asleep,
We will trail our fingers in the dark lake,
And sing the songs that made us feel immortal
As younger old friends.

Competition

When we seek to discover the best in others, we somehow bring out the best in ourselves. ~William A. Ward

Why then, are we so inclined to compete with one another? I believe competition with ourselves can spur us on to be our best, but competition with others I find fairly baffling. I’m sure I’m in the minority in this country, but I have actually struggled against feeling too competitive throughout my life. I see so much better results when people are cooperative and collaborative that I can’t imagine anyone choosing to be otherwise.

I think competition is related to a scarcity mentality, to fear. We seem to think that if someone else gets a share of the pie, it means less for us. We somehow believe that if we’re not on top, in front, most loved, we lose. I believe this attitude itself makes us lose–our human connections, our empathy, our ability to love ourselves and others unconditionally. Competition is at the root of envy.

In what situations do you feel most competitive with others? In traffic? With siblings? In your work life? How do you express it? Often, it’s not what we say and do but what we don’t say or do that indicates we are envious. What would happen if you focused on our shared abundance, on love rather than fear, on looking for and acknowledging the best in others?

Reading, Not Writing

It’s easy, after all, not to be a writer. Most people aren’t writers, and very little harm comes to them. ~Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot

I have just finished Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life, from which this quote comes. I’m on a reading jag; I’ve read 3 books and 2 magazines this weekend!

The other quote I flagged in the book was from sculptor Anne Truitt: “The most demanding part of living a lifetime as an artist is the strict discipline of forcing oneself to work steadfastly along the nerve of one’s own most intimate sensitivity.” I can relate.

This week I will attend my writer’s group (for only the second time, since they took a summer break). There’s something about being in a group of creative people that makes the air vibrate with energy. I am hopeful that it will be an inspiration for me to write–that, and my new book of poetry by Jane Cooper. Here’s a short one of hers:

Praise

But I love this poor earth,
because I have not seen another….~Osip Mandelstam

Between five and fifty
most people construct a little lifetime:
they fall in love, make kids, they suffer
and pitch the usual tents of understanding.
But I have built a few unexpected bridges.
Out of inert stone, with its longing to embrace inert stone,
I have sent a few vaults into stainless air.
Is this enough–when I love our poor sister earth?
Sister earth, I kneel and ask pardon.
A clod of turf is no less than inert stone.
Nothing is enough!
In this field set free for our play
who could have foretold
I would live to write at fifty?

Groupthink

You don’t get harmony when everybody sings the same note. ~Doug Floyd

I have just read Doris Lessing’s Prisons We Choose to Live Inside, and it has caused me to reflect on my relationship to family, community, and groups over the course of my life. “Very few people indeed” Lessing says, “are happy as solitaries, and they tend to be seen by their neighbours as peculiar or selfish or worse.” She concedes that we are group animals, and the problem is not in belonging to groups, but “not understanding the social laws that govern groups and govern us.”

For groups exert pressure to conform. In groups, we believe we are acting as individuals, and can point to our differences of opinion as evidence. But there are underlying assumptions and sacred cows that are never discussed–that are usually not even noticed–by those within the group. Lessing holds that there are very few nonconformists, “original minds,” and that “on them depends the health, the vitality of all our institutions.”

I am in a period of very little interaction with groups but have felt hungry for community. Can I move back into community with an open heart that will also accommodate a cool, self-aware head? One encouraging passage in Lessing reports that “researchers of brain-washing and indoctrination discovered that people who knew how to laugh resisted best.” People who don’t laugh at themselves, she says, include fanatics, bigots, tyrants, and oppressors. “True believers don’t laugh. Their idea of laughter is a satirical cartoon pillorying an opposition person or idea.”

May I embrace my “group animal” nature without succumbing to groupthink. May I laugh open-heartedly and open-mindedly at myself!

Favorites on Gratitude

For some time now, I have been writing in a gratitude journal (thanks, Claudia). I also subscribe to daily quotes on gratitude from gratefulness.org. Here are some of my favorites.

As I express my gratitude, I become more deeply aware of it. And the greater my awareness, the greater my need to express it. What happens here is a spiraling ascent, a process of growth in ever expanding circles around a steady center. ~David Steindl-Rast

Recipients of our appreciation are apt to express their own gratitude to others, lengthening the unending, golden chain of connections-in-goodness that stretches across the world. ~Mary Ford Grabowsky

No one is as capable of gratitude as one who has emerged from the kingdom of night. ~Elie Wiesel

Gratitude is so close to the bone of life, pure and true, that it instantly stops the rational mind, and all its planning and plotting. ~Regina Sara Ryan

The more alert we become to the blessing that flows into us through everything we touch, the more our own touch will bring blessing. ~David Steindl-Rast

The day I acquired the habit of consciously pronouncing the words “thank you”, I felt I had gained possession of a magic wand capable of transforming everything. ~Omraam Mikhael Aivanhov

There’s a self-expansive aspect of gratitude. Very possibly it’s a little-known law of nature: the more gratitude you have, the more you have to be grateful for. ~Elaine St. James

Today, I am grateful for the gentle rain, the ability to work from home, the grant our agency was just awarded that will provide 45 scholarships for students to get a Master’s Degree in Library Science, the healthy lunch my husband made for me, my yoga practice, a weekend (without pressing obligations) stretching before me, and the beautiful place in which I live.

What are you grateful for today?

Routine

That is the crux of what makes habits difficult to change: They are not so much a function of your attitudes, preferences, and beliefs, but instead they tend to be cued pretty directly by the environment you are in. ~Wendy Wood, cognitive psychologist at Duke University, in Rabiya S. Tuma’s “How to Take Control of Your Habits,” Yoga+ Joyful Living, Jan-Feb. 2008.

Taking control of habits is a recurring theme for me (Challenge to Myself), so I am always alert to new ways to think about establishing better habits, particularly around eating and exercise.

This weekend I was traveling, and so found myself eating out, choosing junk food, not exercising, and sleeping too much when I got home. This occurs more often than I would like, and I have said for a while now that I need to establish more of a routine so that I don’t find myself having to make decisions on the fly when I am tired, hungry, stressed, or otherwise vulnerable.

Habits are useful ways of preserving energy. Tuma writes, “Investigators have found that constant vigilance or attention to our goals, and the need to repeatedly inhibit ingrained responses to the cues around us, can be exhausting.”

Tactics that work to build new habits, according to Tuma, include changing the context (I’ve stopped driving by the DQ on my way home!), keeping goals realistic, and paying attention. Creating a new situation (for example, exercising regularly with a friend) and linking two activities together can also help. “After you brush your teeth, head straight for the meditation cushion. After a few weeks of this, the very act of brushing your teeth will prime you for sitting.”

Now I understand better why I have been craving more routine in my life. It is exhausting having to make conscious choices too much of the time. I have started attending yoga twice a week on my way home from work, so that is definitely a start. I think I will make a list of a few more healthy habits I can build in, using some of the tactics recommended in this article.

How do you stay on track with healthy habits?