I am Surprised I am Not Failing

This month, I’m trying to get off Facebook. I am not planning to delete my account. But I want to spend less time turning to Facebook as a way to distract myself from loneliness and hard work.

1. Nurture local friendships

At first blush, I wasn’t sure I was doing very well at this. But looking at my calendar, I’ve had 3 coffee dates in the last 4 days with a mix of new people and people I’ve been getting to know. Last Monday, I had dinner with some friends I hadn’t seen in 3 months (they were kind enough to only give me a small guilt trip). Earlier this month, I went to a couple of events where I was open to connecting with new people – and did.

This is where setting goals and checking in is so important. According to my internal sense, nothing had changed. I was pretty sure I hadn’t hung out with anyone. As often happens, I was wrong.

2. Walk or meditate in the morning before getting online

This was going awesome, until it rained for a week straight. When I didn’t have walking as an option, I fell back in to old patterns.

I felt especially hard hit with the combo of rain, daylight savings time, Mercury retrograde, and changes at work that finally are giving me some space to breathe. I didn’t want to get out of bed all week, and when I did get out of bed, I wanted to do something soothing and mind numbing.

Even with the challenges, I felt more conscious of switching to Facebook this week. Awareness is the first step of behavior change!

When it’s raining out, my morning routine will now include time in front of the light box.

3. Writing 5 minutes every day

I am not sure how to evaluate this goal.

I certainly have spent a ton of time writing at work. But I think this is for personal writing.

I have written something nearly every day either in my journal or online at the Floating Playground. It feels like a secret, sneaky way to count up the writing I have done.

Yet, I think this should count toward my goal: “I want to be writing more. I have so much to reflect on right now, tons of blogging material …. In setting this small goal, I get worried that there is not enough time.”

The goal is to get me reflecting on my life, in some small but measurable way. To prove that this is doable, even with everything else going on. And I have – at least 14 of the first 17 days of the month. Given that I’ve turned so much of my attention to rest and restoration, this is actually pretty amazing.

4. Practicing restoration when I’m tired

This month has been a lot of practice in saying, “I’m tired! Of course I’m tired! Anyone would be tired if they had been doing everything I have been doing. It’s time to rest!”

Rest has meant:

• Reading fiction while relaxing in a warm bath
• Creating safe rooms for the part of me that’s super tired and overwhelmed
• Getting some new bedding that helps my bed look like the safe room I keep envisioning – super soft feathery bed, covered in piles of white pillows and the softest blankets
• Faking a nap
• Sleeping in
• Not worrying about any of these goals, or meditating, or anything else that I remotely feel like I’m supposed to do

I felt especially worried about not meditating. It has been such a stabilizing force for me, and I worried it was gone forever.

My catastrophizing mind is surprised to see that I just had 2 days where I didn’t meditate at all, and 4 days where I meditated less than my 30 minutes per day. But over the course of the last week, I’ve meditated for 30 minutes 3 out of 7 days. Not bad.

I am seeing a pattern where I’ve done limited meditation on Thursday and Friday the past two weeks. I may want to be more intentional this upcoming week about incorporating at least a small sit on these days. And notice what is making sitting hard. The end of the work week? A perception that I need to let loose?

Get Off Facebook

Why, hello March! Let’s play with intention and starting small. And let’s practice doing things daily that sustain me, but are so easy to let slide when things get busy!

And when I’m worried I can’t do all these new things, just remember – get off Facebook.

1. Nurture local friendships

I moved to the Bay Area just over a year ago. I am in that period where I’m longing for good, strong local community, but it hasn’t really gelled yet.

I have lots of good people in my life and lots of acquaintances. But with life being hard and busy right now, I’m finding myself reluctant to lean heavily on people I am just getting to know.

Life has felt heavy for most of this past year. I want to connect with people in lighthearted ways in addition to being able to lean in for the heavy parts.

I would like to connect with people I’m already connected with, and be open to meeting new people as well.

2. Walk or meditate in the morning before getting online

I started this after a Facebook confession that my morning habit was usually to get directly on Facebook. It’s a terrible way to wake up to the day, so many inputs, articles to get distracted by, pictures to comment on.

I would eventually like to have a different relationship to Facebook, one that’s more intentional about my desire to connect, and less about my desire to check out from whatever I’m working on. But I wanted to start small with something that felt doable and concrete. I already started this habit a few days ago, but I want to continue it this month because I know how pernicious Facebook is.

3. Writing 5 minutes every day

I want to be writing more. I have so much to reflect on right now, tons of blogging material.

Yet I’m usually tired of being on my computer by the time I get done with work. It’s one of the perils of working a full time job from home and then wanting to do some work on the side, also from home.

In setting this small goal, I get worried that there is not enough time. If I set a goal of 20 minutes per day, will that encroach on my meditation time? Can I really meditate for 30 minutes, write for 30 minutes, go for a walk, work for 8 hours, and have time for friends, feeding myself, etc, etc?

I don’t believe this is possible.

Yet, I also am afraid to count up how many hours I spend on Facebook. Or watching TV. There is likely time.

I’m starting small to not freak out the parts of me that believe in “NO TIME!” We will see how it goes.

4. Practicing restoration when I’m tired

I am often reluctant to rest.

Tired? Eat something for an energy boost. Or check Facebook to take my mind off whatever is bothering me. Or push through and hope my work is engaging enough to get me a second wind.

I have had a few emotionally draining days lately. And it’s true – I don’t have a lot of space to just stop and lay in bed for 10 hours.

But perhaps there are options between sleeping 10 hours and ignoring the fact that I need rest. To try:

• Restorative yoga poses
• Create a safe room for the part of me that’s super tired and overwhelmed
• Step outside for ten deep breaths
• Drink water
• Take a 20-minute nap (or fake a nap)

If Only All of Life was Apples to Apples

In July, I started sharing my Sunday ritual of monthly goal setting and the weekly or mid-month check-ins. I have a bad habit of forgetting how much change happens over the course of a month, so this check-in helps me remember to celebrate all that I do!

OCTOBER Goals

1. Clear priorities for political campaigning

It’s the final whirlwind month before the November 2nd election. I’m terrified that crazy tea party candidates like Ken Buck will be elected here in Colorado. But I barely have time to do more than post on Facebook about how Ken Buck must be defeated. I’m swamped with organizing against 60-61-101, a trio of ballot initiatives that would devastate Colorado. More jobs lost on top of those lost in the recession, the state would take over control over local schools, and we wouldn’t be able to build basic things like roads, bridges, or state buildings. Anyone reasonable (read: anyone not in the tea party) thinks these are a terrible idea. Unfortunately, the tea party are energized and fired up and ready to vote. The rest of us are a tad bit apathetic.

So it’s been hard to set boundaries around the political organizing. Because OMG. What if our state and country are taken over by radical extremists? It’s freaking me out. I’m doing a good job at least of setting priorities for the work that needs to be done, and I took all of Friday off because I was burnt after a week of long days and nights. Well, most of Friday off because I was incensed to come home to a Vote Yes mailer, paid for by the “nonprofit” group Active Citizens Together, a known front for Douglas Bruce to hide campaign expenditures from the public. GAH!

Noticings for the next time I’m this engaged in a political campaign: the final weeks require a lot of quick response time. Make sure to leave time for that, and to develop agreements with your team beforehand about how to make quick decisions about how to respond to crazy mailers like this one.

2. Apply for fantastic jobs in San Francisco

I applied for a dream job with Spirit Rock Meditation Center. There is no timeline listed on the announcement, but it’s still up so I’m going to assume that means they are still in the accepting applications stage of the game. I’m also in conversations with another Bay Area nonprofit about providing some help to them.

I’m occasionally scanning the job ads, but only applying to the perfect jobs at this point.

3. Post some of the great writing I’ve been doing on the blogs

Yes! This week, watch Rooting Nonprofits for a series on Buddhism and nonprofit management. I wrote SO MUCH for this job application at Spirit Rock that had to be cut down to a cover letter. So the cuts are going up on the blog instead! I’m posting segments of an essay I wrote that helped me flesh out how my experience led to my philosophy of leadership.

The process was a good lesson in how hard I have to work to write what I want to go on my other blog. It’s a lot of rounds of editing and re-editing. But I have hope for more writing over there now that the dam has broken again!

4. Maintain the things that sustain me – meditation, eating well, an organized house, and time with friends

Gorgeous hikes to enjoy Colorado’s fall colors. No pictures sadly, I was just out enjoying myself. I struggled with eating well – too many 5-8pm meetings. I need to remember to have more quick food available when that schedule is my life. There was just no time to cook. I’m enjoying the Essential Dharma class, and have turned my house into something manageable again. I’m sure it will be a wreck by Tuesday.

Apples to Apples is the best game ever. Pure giggles & laughter.

How Kate Niles and The Book of John breaks me open and puts me back together again

Prologue

My dear friend Kate Niles just released her second novel The Book of John. Last September, she sent me an advance copy to read, as in the freaking Microsoft Word document that she had sent off to the publishers. I felt special and fabulous and important to have this advance copy by one of my favorite authors ever. But I felt like an ass when nearly 4 months had passed and I still hadn’t dared to click open the file.

The new year arrived and with it some shifts in energy that made me think that just possibly maybe this was the time to read Kate’s novel. I had finally started to make some peace in an on-again off-again relationship with a dear love with whom I was in a constant cycle of pushing him away and drawing him back. This book – as Kate herself and all her writing does – broke wide open my old stuck patterns and cleared space for a new way to be.

I stormed off a set of emails to Kate while engrossed in the book. Rather than a traditional book review, which I don’t have the first clue how to do, here’s my raw, unfiltered response to Kate of how the book moved me. I hope it inspires you to let this book move you too.

My Love Letter to Kate, or The Review

I finally started reading The Book of John last night. I’ve felt guilty, like a terrible friend for asking for an advance copy of the book and just letting it sit in my inbox for months.

I forced myself to go to sleep last night after devouring the first 2 parts. I have to work today, you know. I need to be responsible again after a few weeks of parties and friends and drinking and flirting with ideas of taking on a whole set of lovers (visions of sugar plums dance in my head).

But damn it Kate, if I don’t wake up at 4:20am, hours before my alarm is to go off, just overflowing with a stream of consciousness review of how amazing this book is, how heartbreaking it is, yet gently heartbreaking in that good way that all our hearts need broken open to air out the gentleness inside, so the pieces of our hearts can heal back together in more wholesome ways. Our hearts (my heart) are such a jumbled mess, it’s like they are Frankenstein hearts mashed together from the pieces of our previous lifetimes, our karma (good and bad) mashing them into something that just barely functions. And we walk through our lives waiting to have our hearts broken open so they can be re-healed in a way that makes them function slightly better, makes us slightly more capable of love, one step closer to Nirvana. This is how your book breaks my heart open.

I don’t think I’ve ever felt so identified with a male character as I do with John. I didn’t realize that I’d given up on reading books with male characters (usually by male authors) because I feel so alienated from the world painted around them. But John. I don’t even know how you make me identify with him, with his painful insecurities which make him run from love and intimacy because OH MY GOD, if someone really saw just how horrible it was on the inside, if I let them in that close and then they SAW – the rejection would be worse than death. I’m nothing like John and I’m everything like John. I’ve been reading since 3 and I am best at those theoretical flights of fancy that John finds so impossible. Yet I settled for an MA when my inability to deal with life made me drop out from the PhD program I worked so hard to try to make work. I’d like to believe that I am not nearly as insecure as John, that his flaws are so much deeper than my own, that when faced with love, with soul connection, that I would transcend insecurity and be made whole in that love. Yet today I’m floundering, failing, wanting to run, wanting to stay on the surface of a relationship that everyone around me who remotely matters can see clearly is this deep soul connection, even my friends who’ve heard me bitch about the worst of it, and are just barely refraining from saying, “Can you dump him already, because I’m tired of hearing you bitch?” – even those friends are saying, “Clearly you two are in for the long haul.” And still I want to run far, far, far away. Still I want to choose something other, something easier, something  where I don’t have to get quite so deep. This is how you make me identify with John who both is and is not me.

And this is where I stop being guilty that I’m just reading the book, because reading a book by you is not simply for the pleasure, not simply for passing the time on a sandy beach somewhere. Reading a book by you makes me wake up at 4:20AM with a broken/healing heart, with a clarity of just how insecure I’m being in this world. Timing is everything when reading this gift of a book, and while I thought I was reading it as your friend, to give you feedback about how  great it is and how much I loved it, I will be honest that I am reading it for myself, which is really the only way to read. And the past few weeks, I’ve been oscillating widely, wildly between risking intimacy with this man and running away into someone else’s arms. And I’ve been watching that oscillation, wondering when I might get off the roller coaster, looking to good friends for insight and answers because I still don’t fully trust my internal experience that has me oscillating so wildly. And it wasn’t until my dear friend Nico turned to me on New Year’s Eve, and again on Saturday night to say clearly, “These excuses about you have to break up because he wants a farm and you want to move to the city – this is all just shit in your head.” – only then was I ready to read this book. Only then could I watch John who is me and who is not me flounder painfully in his insecurities. And because he is enough not like me, I can see the mistakes he makes, how even when he sees that he should ask for help that he’s asking all the wrong people for all the wrong things. How miserable running away to a tiny shack in the opposite of here really is. How tragic. Because he is not me, I can see how tragic this all is, how solvable it all is if he is just willing to risk intimacy and openness about all of his inadequacies, if he stays rather than runs from soul connections. It’s so clear because he is not me, so I can form the solution clearly with him, and only then see how applicable it is back to my own tragedy, how it’s such a big “DUH” in our lives, but I’m too often wrapped up in the drama and my old patterns to see the obvious solution. This is how your book heals me.

An hour has passed while writing this, and it is still not time for my alarm to go off. I’m going to put on a pot of coffee and start in on Part 3. It’s been ages since I’ve stayed up late to finish a book, but I don’t think I’ve EVER got up early to finish one!

Epilogue of Love

Well, it’s finished, read madly this morning, making me late for work – a great start to the new year!

My raw reader response from this morning still stands, with this epilogue. I get to the part about sin, about evil being the denial of another’s humanity, about the sins we commit daily against ourselves when we deny our own hopes and dreams. And I say outloud to myself in the early dawn shadows, “Shit. This is the place in a Kate Niles novel where I start sobbing. Where the container busts wide open, where any last vestige of grasping to inadequacy is obliterated.  Fuck you! Thank you!”

I love you! Thank you for writing another book that helps me rebirth myself yet again. Please please please, don’t you dare ever stop writing!

P.S. Find out how Kate Niles’ brand new book The Book of John breaks you open and puts you back together again. Now selling in your favorite indie bookstore (and those big behemoth ones too)!

Silence

Dear Blog,

This is what I would say if I could feel well enough to write.

The bad side is, when I’m not doing well, neither is my blog. We’ll sit in silence and stare at each other for long periods of time (the cursor always blinks first). When my emotions are tangled, so are my fingers, and I can’t write. I get knotted up. I get tongue- and finger-tied.

Thankfully, Kyeli said it for me instead.

Hope to see you again, soon.

Love, Dawn

Edit

There’s a way that I lose my writing voice when I start to edit. It’s worst when I try to edit while writing, try to overthink my audience, what they want, what they will think about whatever is going on in my head. When I try to write “a blog post” and be all official about it, it just gets bland.

Monday morning at 4:20 AM, I remembered that I write best when it comes out stream-of-consciousness. When I don’t worry too much whether the uninitiated reader has all the background necessary to understand what’s going on. I woke up that early, thinking about my friend Kate’s newest book The Book of John (check out the excerpt). “New” as in “not actually out until May 2010, but I’ve got the freaking Microsoft Word version because I’m just that cool.” I started reading the book Sunday night, and forced myself to go to bed because I had to work early on Monday morning. But damn Kate and her damn books, they get under your skin, they whisper into your dreams. They have some secret way to tell your cat that there’s more important things to be doing than sleeping, and they hypnotize your cat into meowing in your face, pawing your shoulder until you are wide awake and thinking about how heartbreaking this book is.

So I surrendered to the power of Kate’s book, and got up and wrote her a stream of consciousness review. And even now I can’t imagine publishing it direct to this blog without editing the fuck out of it. And since “the fuck” is the juicy part, if I edit the fuck out of it, there’s really not much left. So I’m writing this review of my review, trying out my looser voice, the voice I use freely in emails to friends, but still haven’t quite found a way to publish it to the interwebs. Kate is beyond an inspiration to find my own voice, speak my own truth, own my vulnerability as the most precious of the crown jewels.

One Year Left

How would I live my life if I knew I had just one year left to live?

No, this is not a roundabout way of telling folks I have been diagnosed with a serious illness. Instead it’s a challenge Jean Smith refers to in The Beginner’s Guide to Walking the Buddha’s Eightfold Path. It’s a Buddhist lesson is really embracing impermanence, that whatever is now will not be here forever. It might not even be here tomorrow.

While I’m not one to get wrapped up in routine or shiny things to make me happy, I do find myself attached to the comfort of what is known. I don’t love my apartment lately. It’s too small for entertaining, and the plumbing problems have gotten pretty nasty. But it’s comfortable, it’s cheap, it’s in a good location. And it’s easier to just stay here than it is to move. It’s a lot of energy to step out into the unknown. Especially when I’m already pushing my limits in other parts of my life.

If I had one year left to live, I’d quit my jobs. Immediately. I would move back home to be near my parents, and use that as a home base to visit all the other people I love. I would do a lot of meditation and reading about death and dying so I could stay calm and present for my last year, rather than wallowed in anxiety. I’d spend at least a week just staring at the ocean. And I’d spend any other energy I had left trying to write down and share whatever wisdom I’d gained in my short time here.

That vision is clear to me, but I’m having a hard time imagining actually putting that all into practice right now. The hardest part to imagine is moving to Indiana, partly because it would be hardest to continue meditation practice there without much of a community of others. Indiana is not known for its Buddhist communities! I’m also having a hard time writing regularly – it seems that  work and other community projects are taking priority, even though these aren’t a key part of my vision of this last year. It’s also easier not to worry about paying the bills when you’ve got a very limited time frame and financial help from family.

What makes it so hard to live out our deepest priorities?