Mindfulness, Sickness & Health

Let yourself be

Mindfulness was not the first form of meditation I tried. Starting before the age of 10, I experimented with visualizations, self-hypnosis, breathing practices, and more.

I pictured myself walking through forests. I imagined orbs of light permeating my being. I repeated “I am still,” over and over again, all in the hopes of being able to heal, to change myself into something I liked better. Most of the practices left me feeling incompetent and more tired than I had been before I’d started. I thought of myself as a spiritual person, but I was not getting this meditation thing—at all.

I had just about written it off entirely, when a few of my friends recommended Jack Kornfield’s teaching on mindfulness. I put on the CD, aware of equal parts hope and fatalism thrumming in my chest—maybe it could help? But it probably won’t.

The beginning was what I’d expected—about adopting the appropriate posture and taking some deep breaths. Grudgingly, I complied.

I don’t remember exactly what words came next, but at some point, he told me to just let things be as they are, without judging them and without trying to change them.

A wash of relief flooded my body. You mean I don’t have to make myself somehow feel better than I do? You mean I can just sit here and let my body and heart hurt, and not try to do a damn thing about it? I don’t know if I cried, but I was achingly grateful. I hadn’t realized that the reason I wasn’t “getting” meditation was that I had always been attempting to make something happen. I had been all effort and no flow.

I can just imagine whatever angels that may have been looking out for me wrinkling their foreheads in compassion. “Honey, could you just loosen your grip . . . like just the teeniest, little bit? No? Well, that’s okay, too.”

It may sound counterintuitive, but allowing my body, my mind, my heart to all be okay—even though they decidedly didn’t feel okay was lifechanging for me.

Even so, after more than a decade of practicing mindfulness and two years of studying (in a program co-led by Jack Kornfield, as it happens) to become a meditation teacher, it’s easy to forget that I am not meditating to make myself better, more successful, or more acceptable to the world.

I am meditating to remember—that though I may not be healthy, I am whole. Though I’m not super-productive, I am enough. And though I might not fit in with my culture, I am absolutely loveable.

All I need to do, is let myself be.

Mindfulness, Sickness & Health

Making peace with reality

I am in the middle of what I have just decided to call “the October grunts”. It’s that time when the weather changing from summer to autumn wreaks havoc on my body. The fibromyalgia pain activates, allergies intensify, fatigue wraps around like a suffocating blanket, and I often just feel like lying around moaning.

I am wrestling with reality. A part of me insists that “this shouldn’t be happening.” Another chastises me for being lazy. And another devises ingenious plans for how to surmount my obstacles—often through the meticulous employment of a planner, countless colored pens, and a compassionless iron will to keep soldiering on no matter what.

The wisest part of me knows that this is just the way it is right now. It invites me to inquiry. “How can these limitations serve me?”

They can instruct me in the wisdom of kindness—which is always a good idea, even when I’m not struggling.

They can remind me to, as Thich Nhat Hanh’s said, “Go slowly, breathe, and smile.”

They can help me implement the advice of Martha Beck (from whom I learned life coaching) to take turtle steps toward my goals because, right now, I don’t have the ability to take any other sized steps.

They can bring me back to the moment, back into my body to discover the places where the pain is caused by the way I’m holding my body rather than by something over which I have no control.

They can encourage me to not overthink things and, for heaven’s sake, stop pretending that perfection actually exists!

I would much rather not have them, but these “limitations” can serve me in any number of ways . . . if I let them.

How, if at all, are limitations serving you?

Mindfulness, Nature & Spirituality, Sickness & Health

Taking a Nice and Easy Day

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Yesterday was a busy day.

So was the day before.

And the day before that.

Life has been piling up. Mostly it’s been good things.  It’s been me taking steps in the direction of my goals.  It’s been me investing in my family and my community.  It’s also taking care of my ailing cat (who is completely recovered now, by the way!).  And unexpectedly having to take my car to the garage.  It’s been a lot.  And, somehow, there always seems to be more.  One more thing I must do today, this week, this lifetime—just so that everything will turn out the way I want it to.  Do you hear God laughing at me right now?  Yeah, me too.

I still have several things on my to-do list for this week, but I know I’m not going to get to all of them, so I am making accommodations. For one thing, this was not the blog post I had planned for this week.  I was going to make a video and write about making art every day.  I was excited about it, but it’s too much.  A part of me says, Hey, just push through. It’s just one more thing.  Pour another cup of coffee.  You can do it!  And that part of me is right.  I probably could do it, but at the cost of becoming more energy indebted and less, well, me.  Does that make sense?  Have you  noticed that when you overextend yourself for too long that you turn into an ugly, ungrateful, wretched, slobbering monster?

Or is that just me?

Anyway, the biggest problem with my monster is that she invariably makes things worse. Every little molehill becomes Mt. Everest.  Every tiny slight becomes a gaping wound.  Every mistake becomes life-threatening.  This attitude perpetuates a cycle of unhappiness and, ultimately, under-productiveness.

A few months ago I read a blog post on Kris Carr’s website titled The Myth of Finding Your Purpose. She says it’s her most popular post of all time and I can understand why.  In it, she begs the question, “What if finding your purpose is about . . . nurturing yourself?”  At first, I felt a little perplexed by this.  How can that be a purpose? Isn’t that just something that happens when you pursue and achieve your true calling(s)?  But when I thought about it, I realized that my callings—literally, the things that call to me—are simply things I do in service to my purpose.  And my purpose is to be the best—the healthiest and happiest and kindest—version possible of this particular conglomeration of cells and spirit that my parents happened to name Diana.  My purpose is to spend as little time in the monster skin as possible.

So today, I am taking a nice and easy day. Not a vacation day.  Not a sick day.  I thought about both of these options.  I thought about not blogging, but I realized this is one of the things I do that feeds my spirit, and I didn’t want to rob myself of that.  A nice and easy day means being honest with myself about what I can and cannot accomplish.  It means not expecting too much.  It means reminding myself that even though all those things on my list seem imperative, probably none of them are actually life and death  It means going slowly, taking the most important thing first, and letting it take however long it takes.  It means remembering to breathe, to release my shoulders from their defensive stance next to my ears, and to enjoy the sunshine flowing through the window.

 

Mindfulness, Nature & Spirituality, Sickness & Health, Writing & Reading

How and Why I Give Myself a Little Credit

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Where am I losing energy? I ask myself this question a lot.  I want to know what is draining me, what is pulling me down.  I want to minimize those influences.  Sometimes these things are, partially or completely, beyond my control—doctor’s appointments, conflicts with loved ones, stores with disturbing fumes.  In these cases, I can take deep breaths.  I can take it slowly.  I can limit my exposure to necessary, but distressing situations.  But, in the end, I really just have to shrug my shoulders and go through them (Squelch! Squerch!  See last week’s post about this.)

I’ve been realizing recently though, that there is at least one way in which I am losing energy that is completely within my control. It’s the way that I talk to myself.  I know, this is not news.  Some 2500 years ago, the Buddha was warning folks that “what we think, we become”.  But I’m speaking very specifically here about my attitude toward how I am approaching any given task.  I have noticed that very often I am telling myself that I am not doing a good enough job.  The song goes a little something like this: It’s taking me too long to shop. I am paying too much for this box of granola bars.  Why can’t I write faster?  Why can’t I always make the perfect egg?  I’m not learning fast enough.  I should be making better progress.  I can’t believe I spent so much time playing games on my iPad today.  I should have been nicer to that stranger.  I should be getting more done.  I should have gone to bed earlier . . .

You get the idea. If I let it, my dissatisfaction with myself becomes a constant drone behind all my other thoughts.  It’s not fun.  And it’s been kicking my ass.  It’s been me, kicking my own ass, draining my energy, allowing my power to squirt out every which way.  Not cool.

So what’s the antidote? Well, of course, there is the wonderful practice of mindfulness in which I catch myself having these destructive thoughts and counteract them by expressing self-compassion—maybe with a hand on my heart and an internal assurance of, “It’s okay, Sweetie.”  If there are any casual observers of my behavior out there in my town, they can vouch for the fact that I have my hand on my heart, a lot.  It works. But, what if I forget?  What if my mindfulness is not working very well, and I get to the end of the day, and find that not only have I been disapproving of myself all day, but I didn’t even notice I was doing it?  Well, that’s when I get out my gold stars.  You think I’m joking.  I’m not.  gold-stars-learning-to-give-myself-credit-dianaklein-comI now have several exciting sheets of congratulatory stickers (like the ones used by kindergarten teachers) and, as I record the events of the day in my journal, I think of at least one thing I accomplished, write it down, and I plop one of those stickers down next to it.  Sometimes it’s for doing something I was scared to do—like expressing myself honestly even though I feared retribution.  But the bar is not always that high.  Sometimes I give myself a gold star for vacuuming.  Sometimes it’s for self-care, like say, napping.  You’re laughing right now.  I get it, but the truth is that if you’re like me, you do a whole bunch of things during any given day for which you give yourself no credit, whatsoever.  Why?  Because “You’re supposed to have done that.  You don’t get a gold star for brushing your teeth, or feeding your family, or hugging your kids when you’re an adult.  That’s ridiculous.” finished-productivity-stuff-learning-to-give-myself-credit-dianaklein-com I agree, one hundred percent—but ONLY, if you are asking for that gold star from someone else.  I can’t expect other people to get excited about my taking good care of myself.  I can’t expect them to reward me.  But when I acknowledge to myself the things that I am doing—even the stuff that I “should” be doing as a matter of course—I shift my self-attitude from a person who’s failing all the time, to someone who could maybe do some things better, but who is also doing a heck of a lot of things absolutely right.  And that chick, definitely has more energy than Perpetually Failing Woman.  Plus, she’s a lot more fun to be around.

P.S. If you like the opening image, you may want to follow me on Instagram or Facebook. I post new art images daily.

Sickness & Health, Writing, Writing & Reading

The Values of Silence

My fingers hover over the keyboard. I have so many thoughts, so many reactions.  Sometimes I even type them out, giving fleeting voice to my opinions, but always—almost always—I think better of it.  I hit delete.  I watch as a blinking cursor erases my feelings one letter at a time.

I don’t think I need to say that it’s been quite the week. We all have feelings and many of us are expressing them—some in beautiful ways, some in hateful, many somewhere in the middle.  Mostly, I have resisted expressing my political opinions anywhere on the internet.  And after all that has happened, all that may happen, I wonder to myself why and if such a decision been wise.

The why is fairly easy: I don’t want to fight. I don’t want to get into it with anyone—start a battle that no one will win.  I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings.  I don’t want my words to be mis-taken.  There are people in my life whom I not only dearly love, but also deeply respect who vote very differently from the way I do.  I live in a predominantly red community.  Why risk a potential rift?  I hate rifts.  I abhor violence.  It feels, at this moment in time, that we seem unable to speak to each other civilly—that a disagreement about ideology immediately devolves into name-calling.  Demeaning the value of each other as humans whether they be called “deplorable” or “nasty” seems to be commonplace.  I don’t want to participate in this.

When I was writing my memoir about my diagnosis and experience of having CFS a decade ago, I agonized over how to portray certain people in my life—people who have hurt me excruciatingly.. I wasn’t sure that being candid was the right thing to do.  Who might I hurt by speaking my truth?  Was it worth it?  I also didn’t want to use “being authentic” as an excuse for calling people out in a childish way.  Even when I wrote my first novel, I worried how members of my family would interpret certain aspects of it.  Would they be upset?  Would they be mad at me?  I can’t stand it when people are mad me.  It feels like attempting to get a foothold on crumbling land beneath me.  It feels devastating and lonely.  So I have censored myself—a lot (it’s actually part of the reason I have not submitted my work as much as I should).  Some of it has been wise.  I have been grateful when I have held my tongue in situations in which I would have liked to spit fire, but I wonder where exactly the line is.  At what point does silence stop being golden and start becoming a prison warden?

Well, I guess, that point is now. People say that some of us are taking this too personally.  But it is has become personal.  My opinion about what constitutes good government policy differs greatly from that of President-Elect Trump.  That would have been enough for me to not vote for him, but it wouldn’t have made it personal.  What made it personal, was the fact that I, and many women whom I care about, have been victimized by men, and the words and actions of Mr. Trump have ripped open those wounds.  The fact that so many people voted for him feels like an endorsement of a man’s right to hurt and debase women at will.  I know this is not true.  I know that if you are reading this and you voted for Trump, you were not thinking about me or any of my friends who have been through similar things.  You were thinking about Right to Life or the next supreme court justice or repealing Dodd-Frank or any number of practical reasons—maybe even personal reasons—why you felt that Trump was the best choice for this country.  People are suffering and they saw this man as a way out.  I get that.  I can respect that.  But I also weep for it.  And I don’t know how I am supposed to forget all the varied hateful things that Mr. Trump has said and give him my support now.

I have been silent. I have been fearful.  Today, I am saying a little.  How much will I say in the future?  I don’t know.   A part of me wants to speak for myself and for others who cannot, but I still don’t want to start a fight.  I don’t want to cause irreparable damage.  Honestly, I don’t want to put myself in the line of fire.  A part of me just wants to meditate and pray and spread love with smiles and music—and I will do that.  But is continuing silence wise?  Is it responsible?  Can anything be solved without respectful discourse?  I don’t know, but I heard a stat this morning that chilled me to the bones.  Approximately 49% of eligible voters did not vote in this year’s election.  Almost half of the people who have the ability to help decide how we will treat our children, our fellow citizens, our country were completely silent.

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CFS, Reading, Sickness & Health, Writing & Reading

Coming Home to My Body

curiously-smiling-attentively-coming-home-to-my-body-dianaklein-comMy mother and I are walking together this morning. It’s already apparent that it’s a tough one for both of us, but we still do our daily check-ins.  “My legs are hurting a lot,” she tells me.  She knows that the pain in my legs have been a merciless for several days now, so she adds, “Maybe your legs said something to mine, and it spread.”

She’s making a joke. I know this.  But this morning, I am not in the mood.

Despite the pre-dawn darkness she senses my chagrin. “Not you,” she assures me, “your legs!”

“My legs are me,” I explain.

This is a fairly new admission for me. I have spent many, many years dissociating from my body, talking about it in the third person, distaining its weakness.

There’s an interview with Toni Morrison from about a year and a half ago during which, because of chronic pain, she talks about her body in a similar way. “I did so much for you, body, why aren’t you helping me now, when I need you?  I was so nice to you.”  When asked if making peace with her body was hard, she confirms “I do feel like I’m under attack.”

It’s easy to feel this way: My body is failing me. My body hates me.  I hate my body.  I felt this way for a long time.  Oh, I paid lip service in yoga classes to “listening to my body”, but my subconscious was really thinking: Listen to my body? Are you kidding me?  That bitch doesn’t know shit!

Then, in my mid-twenties, a hypnotherapist told me to “Be in your body. You want your body to be there for you, so you need to be there for it.”  I was a little confused.  What does she mean, be in my body? I am in my body, aren’t I?  But then I started thinking about The Robber Bride, a novel by Margaret Attwood I’d read some years earlier.  In it, one of the female characters describes being repeatedly molested as a child, and that her response to this was to leave her body, so that she wouldn’t feel everything that was happening to her so intensely.  This is one of the things I love about novels—they teach so much.  They teach you things you don’t know you need to know.  I had thought, at the time, that Attwood was speaking metaphorically or at the very least, metaphysically.  People don’t really leave their bodies, and if they do, it happens very infrequently.  It took a few years for me to realize that Attwood and the hypnotherapist had it right.  We do leave our bodies.  We hover around them because we have so much about which to think—or so much from which to escape.

My departure from my body was mostly because of the pain. I couldn’t understand why meditation teachers kept wanting me to scan my body.  I knew what my body felt like.  It hurt.  A lot.  I didn’t need to know anything more about it.  I didn’t want to know anything more about it.  I wanted to feel something different, something better.  So I took off, without realizing it, without meaning to, I just left.  It seemed better that way.

But it wasn’t. My retreat from pain was also a retreat from my life.  I became less connected to myself and to everything else.  How can you truly taste an orange if you’re not really there?  How can you taste any of the fruits of life, if you are constantly running away?  Though perhaps, I wasn’t experiencing as much pain, I also wasn’t there for myself.  I had less agency in my life, less ability to accomplish things because I was taking refuge in fantasy and a future that might never come.  Leaving can be okay for a while.  Sometimes we all need a break from reality, but I came to realize that for me, giving up the pain meant giving up everything.

And even then, the pain chases me. Without my attention, my body becomes tenser, harder, unforgiving.

I have taken to doing body scans again—nothing formal, usually it’s when I lie down to take a nap, and I often fall asleep before I finish. But I try to feel the full weight of my body falling into the bed.  I start at my feet, feeling them, expressing some appreciation for them.  I work up my body in this way.  Relaxing into the pain.  Filling the entire volume contained by my skin with my presence, flooding the space between my cells with my being.  Some months ago, without really thinking about it, I started telling myself: This is my body.  It seems kind of silly to remind myself of that and as anyone who has spent much time going to a Catholic church knows, those words can’t help but remind me of the mass.  It seems appropriate somehow, though—that here be an inherent holiness to those words.  That fully inhabiting one’s body could be a sacred act.

When I do this, the pain does not go away, but I feel more relaxed. I feel like my body and I are in this thing together.  We are not at odds.  We are not separate.  I believe, I know, that I am more than a body, but I am also this body.  This body is home.

The artwork for this post was inspired by the work Austin Kleon and Cindy Shepard. If you like it, you might want to check out their stuff, too.  Also, if you enjoyed this post as a whole, please consider sharing it.  🙂

CFS, Mindfulness, Sickness & Health, Writing, Writing & Reading

The Power of Small

I crashed last weekend—exploding pain, unforgiving tiredness, the works. It was particularly disappointing because I had been starting to feel like I was building up a head of steam—moving in the direction I wanted to go.  I had plans.  I had thoughts and ideas sprouting and multiplying.  There’s so much I want to do!  And then plop—the other shoe drops.  It happens to all of us—we feel energized to make exciting, positive change and something happens that we didn’t plan for or something reoccurs that we should have seen coming.  A fly gets in the ointment.  A wrench is thrown into the works.  Our best laid plans go so infuriatingly awry.

When this happens, my instinctive reaction is to do a post mortem: What happened? What did I do wrong?  What did I not do?  This picking apart usually takes place in the presence of my mother, who listens patiently and then says, “Or maybe it’s none of those things.  Maybe it’s just the cycle.  Maybe it’s just what’s happening now.”  At which point, I take a deep breath and grumble, “Yeah, maybe.”

Of course, she’s right. Most of what’s going on is beyond any sense of my control, and I just need to ride it out.  My struggle with it, however, has to do with my expectations.  They have a tendency to get away from me.  I do one thing and then want to, or feel I should, do more and more.  Some years ago, a member of my then writing group brought up the notion of setting a deceptively small goal.  I took to the idea and kept telling myself to “start small”.  However, in the hands (and mind) of a Type A personality, this mantra developed a major flaw.  I might be willing to start small, but all too soon, my mind says, Hey, we better put the pedal to the medal if we’re ever gonna get anywhere! Which, of course, devolves into a wild attempt to do more, which in turn tires, overwhelms, and frustrates me to the point where I am ready to throw in the towel.

start-small-snail-dianaklein-comIn light of this, my new motto is: Start small—and then keep going small until you get whatever the thing is you need to do done. It doesn’t quite trip off the tongue, but, when I think about it,  it is pretty much how I made it through college.  When completely cowed by the mountain of writing I needed to do and the soul-crushing fear of not being able to do it, I would start by opening a document, forcing myself to add one sentence (more if I could) and then, moving to the next paper, do the same.  I would rotate through all of my current projects in this fashion.  Write a line, switch, write a line, switch.  After I had a draft down, I could go back and check for cogency and fix any problems, but it was getting that first layer down that was the biggest challenge—which I overcame only by taking it piece by piece, sentence by sentence.  I still write this way when I am stuck.  I ask myself, What’s the next line? I don’t think about what will come after.  I only have to write one sentence.  And once that’s done.  I do it again.

It can be hard to commit to small steps like this because societal norms so often tell us that if you can’t have the thing you want by tomorrow, you’d best not pursue it at all or worse, it’s not worth having.  I mean, why even bother?  Many of us, when we decide to turn over a new leaf, want to jump in feet first. You see books on lifestyle makeovers and they are all about making wholesale changes to one’s life.  We tell ourselves, we will do everything according to this new code: eat better, sleep better, do yoga, meditate, be creative.  And we forget that our lives are still our lives.  I think people feel either: that they want to change everything all at once without regard to whatever else is going on in their lives or that they are too overwhelmed by their lives to make any changes at all.

do-the-thing-you-can-do-the-power-of-small-dianaklein-comThere is an alternative. Start small.  Do the thing you can do—this is advice I have given myself regularly over the past 20 years (when I haven’t been busy trying to outsmart myself).  If you can meditate for two minutes a day, then meditate for two minutes a day.  If you can eat more vegetables, but can’t eat less sugar, than eat more vegetables and don’t eat less sugar.  And, *this is key*, don’t let your mind sell you a bill of goods that you are somehow falling short!  The saying A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step is, perhaps, a cliché, and, of course, you do have to take all the succeeding steps after that first one if you want to get to your destination, but if you tell yourself that that first step is not, won’t ever be, enough, you will never take the second.

I have big goals. I don’t know if there are enough steps in this body to get me there, but I want to keep walking towards them.  I want to do the thing I can do, consistently, and be proud of each step, giving it the recognition it deserves, because, in a one million-step journey, step number 45,682 is no less important than number 999,999.  Without either, small, seemingly insignificant movement, you will never reach your goal.

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Art & Crafts, Nature & Spirituality, Sickness & Health, Writing & Reading

Invoking Saint Frida

I spent a lot of last weekend in doubt. This is not an unfamiliar place for me.  I frequent the land of doubt on a regular basis.  The source, this time, was my last two posts on running.  Should I, as a CFS sufferer have written about that?  Should I have admitted that I can run now and again?  That right now I am choosing to run, even when there are many other things I cannot do?  When, on a good day, I can only work about four hours?

I felt strange when I started running again in August. I almost didn’t want to see my sister on my run because I was scared to admit that I was able to do it again.  The fear came from two places 1)I didn’t want anyone to think that this meant I was all better, and now could do anything and everything, i.e., I didn’t want people to expect more from me, because I knew I couldn’t give it.  And 2) I was ashamed.  I was ashamed that I was choosing to run rather than do something that might make money or make someone else’s life better.

And when I shared my two posts about running on this blog, I again felt conflicted and scared, and yes, ashamed because I am always scared of what people will think of me. I am scared that they will think I am weak, stupid, free-loading.  I am scared other CFSers will get upset because they aren’t able to run, and my posts might give the impression that they should be able to.  Or maybe people will think that I don’t really have CFS or any other illness since I can exercise at all.  CFS is a highly variable—not only among the afflicted population, but also in an individual.

On Sunday, I listened to a wonderful dharma talk from Tara Brach about how we try to control so many aspects of life and how these attempts ultimately remove us from those things that most make life enjoyable, namely connection and presence. I realized that (once again) I was trying to control what others think of me—my family, my friends, and all the good people of the internet.  And the truth is: it’s a fool’s game.  There is no way to win.  No matter what any of us say or do, no matter how perfectly we curate our feeds and our public lives, someone—perhaps many people—are going to take issue with some aspect of our behavior.

And it’s not always about us. As a senior in college, I took a class that was meant to integrate all that a student had learned within his/her major.  At the beginning of the semester, we were given a list of about 75 names and theories which we were instructed to look up and study independently.  At the end of the semester, we would be given a test on the information—20 questions, matching.  We were warned how challenging it would be and that often students did not excel at it.  I (for some inexplicable, bloody-minded reason) decided to attempt to ace it.  I spent hours looking up the names and making notes on whatever I thought the professor might think was pertinent enough to test us on.  And then I carried my little index cards everywhere, pulling them out whenever I had downtime.  When the professor gave back our tests, he told all of us that someone—not naming any names—had gotten a perfect score—something he hadn’t seen in a while.  I didn’t show anyone the 100 at the top of my exam paper, but as we filed out of the classroom, the other students looked at me knowingly.  One woman, who I had hitherto considered a friend asked, “Did you sleep with him?”  I didn’t even know how to respond.  I was so horrified and confused.  “How could sleeping with the professor have helped me on an objective test?” I wanted to ask, at the same time wanting to demand, ”How dare you?  Is that really what you think of me?”

I am convinced now that it wasn’t what she was thinking of me that caused her to lash out in that moment. It was what she was thinking of herself, how she was feeling about whatever grade she had or had not gotten.  In that scenario, I did everything right.  I worked hard and I achieved success.  And somehow, my behavior (or her reactions to my behavior) still caused pain.  If I were to get it twisted, I would think that I maybe I should have dimmed my own drives and accomplishments to make her feel better, but I think we can all agree that that would have been ridiculous.

What’s the answer then? I don’t know what it is for others, but for me, it’s to forget about trying to control others’ perceptions, and, instead, whip up as much daring as I can in order to be authentic—because I think that’s one of the ways we help each other (and ourselves)—by being vulnerable, being honest, and sometimes, admitting that which is difficult to admit.

invoking-saint-frida-dianaklein-comAs I think about these things, my eyes fall on a candle that lives on my desk. It’s from a line called Secular Saints by philosophersguild.com.  It looks like the regular seven day prayer candle with which most Catholics would be familiar, but instead of featuring the Sacred Heart or Saint Jude, it bears a portrait of Frida Kahlo.  I have long felt a deep connection with this Mexican artist, not only because she composed fascinating and bold paintings, but because she did not shy away from letting people know what she was feeling—the physical and emotional pain that walked with her throughout her life.  She did not try to be perfect—if anything, she exaggerated her perceived faults.  And though she is not a saint in the Catholic sense, I feel myself wanting to invoke her audacious spirit.  There’s a “prayer” on the candle which I like well enough, but my personal petition goes something like this:

O feisty Frida, help me to embrace my flaws and everything that is wrong with my life. Help me to know my true self and to show that self no matter who is watching.  Help me to be brave and bold and to act with resolve and passion.

 What keeps you from being authentic? Do you call on a saint (secular or otherwise) to help?

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Running, Sickness & Health

Interval Training with Runkeeper

I love running, like love it, love it.  I love the sense of freedom I feel when I’m trotting down the road, an easy breeze in my face, a powerful playlist in my ears.  I love it.  But I also have Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.  As you may imagine, the two things are somewhat at odds with one another.  That being said, it’s important for me to stay active.  Though doctors don’t know a lot about how to help CFS patients, most agree that regular exercise is vital.  So I walk every day.  I’ve noticed that although I don’t always feel good doing it (and sometimes I feel downright awful), if I don’t do it, I won’t necessarily feel any better, and often, I’ll feel worse.  So there has been many a day when I have shuffled through my neighborhood getting blown past by friendly, speed-walking grannies and gazing jealously at runners bouncing down the street.  But there have also been times over the last 20 plus years, during which my body has been able to run and—praise all that is good and wonderful—this is one of those times.

When I began in August, I determined to do it slowly. I have the tendency to go whole hog on things.  I always want to push myself to do more, achieve more, but my long experience with this stuff has taught me: that way ruin lies.  In light of this, for the first few weeks, I simply ran on the days I felt up to it for between 10 and 15 minutes and then walked home, always making sure that I was covering at least the same amount of ground that I would have during a regular walking day.  I was using the Nike app to track my runs, but after several annoyances in the past and a recent update that caused still more irritation, I finally threw in the towel.  I decided it was time to shop for a new workout tracker.

After looking at a few, I finally settled on Runkeeper. It tracks my runs via GPS and gives all the statistics one would expect—time, distance, pace, calories burned, etc.  There are even a selection of fun voices to choose from to give you those stats and to cheer you on—such as Boston Fan (think Good Will Hunting) and Yinterval-training-with-runkeeper-dianaklein-comour Conscience (somewhere in the realm of a goofy Tony Robbins?).  My favorite is Mademoiselle—a spritely French lady who tells me that I am fast (though, clearly, I am not) and maybe not completely helpfully encourages me to “Think of all the pain au chocolat now you can eat!”(I have thought about it—a lot.)

Runkeeper also offers a series of challenges to help motivate—one of which was that if I did a mile workout in the following two weeks, it would give me a month free of its premium service.  As I generally walk more than 2 miles a day, this was not too difficult.  Among other things, the premium service offers a series of workouts for each week based upon your previous running experience and the goals you are looking to achieve. Cool, I thought, let me try this.  It only took a quarter of the way through a 30-minute workout, for my thinking to change to: Argh!!! It wasn’t the length or the intensity of the workout that had me swearing, it was its interval nature.  What I hadn’t realized prior to the “run” was that each minute I would be alternating back and forth between walking and running.  I would just be getting into a nice groove with my running when a signal would come though my ear buds telling me that it was time to walk. Never again, I thought.  And then, Yeah, this kind of sucks, but maybe you should just keep with it and see where it goes.

I did stick with it. In the last four weeks, I’ve been following the prescribed four workouts a week and doing my regular walking on the other three days.  As I have progressed, the intervals of running have generally become a bit longer, while the walking intervals have stayed the same and while I don’t particularly like having to stop and walk, I think it’s been good for me.  It’s demanding that thing that I am so often reluctant to give myself—rest.

When I began running as a chubby middle-schooler, things were different. Those first few weeks of cross country practice our coach would lead our team of seven, five girls and two boys, over the lovely grounds of a local college campus.  I huffed and puffed at the back of the train, knowing I was holding every one up and hearing about it once or twice from the cute eighth grader with the floppy brown hair—as if my face hadn’t been red enough from the exertion.  It got better.  I got faster and stronger, and though I never made it to the front of the pack, I ceased to feel embarrassed by my every step.  The problem was that I always seemed to be dealing with some pain or other—knee, ankle, what have you—probably because I had gone from doing nothing to running somewhere between nine and fifteen miles a week.  That’s the way they did it back then.  You started running and just expected the first two weeks of training to be a hell during which you hobbled everywhere as your legs continually screamed about how mean you were.

In contrast, interval training eases a person into the process of running. And, as I’ve said, it seems to have been useful to me as I attempt to rebuild my running practice, but a few weeks ago, I discovered there might be even more to it than that.  I found out that the Runkeeper training program is based, in part, on the work of Jeff Galloway—an Olympian who trained with all the greats in the seventies during the last golden age of American men’s distance running (though, if the last Olympics are any indication, we may be on the verge of another).  Interestingly, despite the fact that the old school version of training dictates that walking during training is a fate worse than death, Galloway’s Run Walk Run Method advises one do just that.  He claims that not only does it help to reduce injury, but it also produces faster times.  He even suggests walking during races.  Doing so helps physically, by allowing the body to recover slightly, instead of going deeper and deeper into oxygen debt, and cognitively, by giving the runner a series of smaller goals to reach (just run these next two minutes, then you can rest) rather than an overwhelming one (run a whole 10k).

My month of free premium service on Runkeeper ended last week. Will I continue?  I’m not sure.  I have to admit, I would get a little excited each Sunday morning waiting for the notification that my workout schedule had been delivered to my app. What’s in store for this week? I’d wonder, What’s next? The drawback for me is that I fear the workouts will progress too quickly for me—demand too much.  As I am not a regular healthy adult, I can’t just expect that I will be able to continue upping my mileage and exertion.  There will be a cap, and I have to be careful that I don’t get caught up in the excitement and do too much.  It would be nice if the app offered a maintenance program or that a user was able to indicate how fast he/she wanted to increase.

Regardless of this, I think I will stick with the interval training. It seems to me that I am running more than I would have if I trained the old way.  I am certainly running faster—which hopefully improves my muscle development.  The big test will, of course, be longevity.  I am hoping that the interval training—if I’m cautious with it—will help me keep my compromised body running (and walking) for several weeks (months? years?!) to come.  We’ll see.

Now, about those chocolate croissants . . .

What about you? What running apps do you use?  What do like and dislike about them?  Have you tried some version of the Run Walk Run Method?  What do you think of it?

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Nature & Spirituality, Prose Poetry, Sickness & Health

The Sighs of a Little Grey Cat

Sometimes, I think I live only for the sighs of my little grey cat.

I breathe solely for those moments when she creeps cautiously onto my tender abdomen as I lie on my bed, worn out and vulnerable.

And she discovers that the crevices in my body meld perfectly to her own. She finds that all boundaries between us are purely artificial.  Her fur, my clothes, our skins become completely permeable. She relaxes her muscles into mine, allowing her very essence to seep down into my being. Our blood vessels become a greater network, somehow effortlessly pumping through feline and human without care for the difference.

She feels all this and she knows that she is home. She knows that she is safe. And because of this, she exhales completely, allowing every, last, tiny cavity of her body to be emptied. She saves nothing. She holds back no secret store to guard against some future scarcity. She lets it all go. All that she needs, all that she will ever need is here in this moment, on my belly.

She tells me this with her sigh, and I cannot help but be moved and awed by her trust, her faith—in the whole of this kaleidoscope universe—and also in the subtle rising and falling of one human stomach.