I believe, at the core of every person, there is a part that is both trusting and trustworthy. Due to life’s traumas, however, that part may recede so deep inside that it may seem unreachable. In time, a person may even develop a belief system that says people are not to be trusted.
When people come from that framework, they are likely to see negativity, and even danger, coming from all sides. They don’t trust what others say, and look for ulterior motives. In time, they may become excessively independent. The thought of being interdependent may be unfathomable. The inability to trust often leads to anxiety and depression.
I have been a psychotherapist for almost 30 years. During those years, I have seen so many clients reclaim their right to trust. As they heal from the traumas of their past, they shift from the life stance that people are untrustworthy to an attitude that people are trustworthy unless proven otherwise.
That doesn’t mean that they start to trust without discrimination though. Once they work through their childhood and adult traumas, they stop projecting negative behaviors on everyone and will become much clearer in seeing the true “red flags” that indicate potential problems. They are more likely to surround themselves with a support system of healthy people. They will know their own weak areas and will avoid situations that are likely to pull them into unhealthy behaviors.
Reclaiming the right to trust is not an easy journey, but it is well worth the time and effort.
To all the familiar voices expounding I should I have to I gotta I don’t have time
It’s gotta be done today If I don’t no one else will If I don’t do this it won’t happen…
Pause
Breathe
Watch a sunset or sunrise through the branches of your favorite trees or on the horizon beyond ocean lake or desert or reflected in the windows of tall buildings.
Have a cup of tea, herbal or black
decaf coffee, or enjoy the caffeine. A glass of wine … or not. Take a moment to sit to stroll barefoot at the edge of the ocean river or lake in a meadow or city park.
When I hear someone use the word “promise” the psychotherapist inside of me goes on alert. The images that come to my mind are children who are in trouble saying “I promise I won’t do it again” to their parents, or parents saying “You promised you wouldn’t do that again” to their children. I also think of bickering children saying to each other, or even to their parents, “You promised!” when someone doesn’t follow through on a promise.
It is important that interactions between adults stay equal with the adult part of one interacting with the adult part of the other. Two adults interacting in a way where one is acting like a parent and the other like a child can be very disruptive to adult relationships.
I think when people of any age hear the word “promise” their minds often add the word “forever”. “Forever” doesn’t take into account that we have a right to change our minds. We may have committed to something out of fear or without having taken the time to think the situation through. Also circumstances may change. When circumstances change then our commitments may need to change.
That doesn’t mean we should just say “I will try.” I’ve been told that Alcoholic Anonymous has a saying that “Triers are liars.” Too often when people say “I will try” they are saying it to get someone off their back and have no intention of doing what the other person is asking for. In my group room, I have a Yoda pillow that says “Do. Or do not. There is no try.”
I suggest people don’t make promises because to me that word in and of itself evokes a child or a parent-child response. I don’t think there is anything wrong with making commitments or agreements but it is important that those commitments be well thought out, clear and not come from an over-adaptive part of us. They should be made with an understanding that we aren’t going to be perfect and that if we decide at a later time that the commitment is not in our best interests we can look at what changes need to be made and re-negotiate it.
“You are enough right now, not after further, future achievements, but now, as you are.
Your wisdom is a valuable contribution to others right now, not after further study and life experience, but now, as it is.
You are worthy of respect and compassion right now, as you are, and not just because Brene Brown says so, but she does say so, and she seems like a nice person.
You are wonderfully lovable as you are right now, not at some future point when you’ve purged yourself of every human foible, but now, and not just because Mr. Rogers would say so, but you know he SO would.
You have the inalienable right to be flawed, ordinary, in your stuff, and off-track. These are fundamental to existence, and in no way subtract from any of the above.
In 1996, I was on an airplane that “fell” 25,000 feet in about a minute’s time. For the next two hours we did not know if we were going to live or die. Since then I have had a sense that I am living on borrowed time. I think I was supposed to die that day, but Grace prevailed. Now, I see every moment I live as a gift and remember that tomorrow is not promised. I have a strong desire to live in a way that allows me to die without regrets.
When I was a new psychotherapist, I assisted in a therapy group led by Delphine Bowers. She used to ask clients if the actions they were thinking about doing would “contribute to their living or their dying.” That question has stuck with me for almost 30 years.
***
I believe I am contributing to my dying, instead of my living, when I am:
Overdoing
I am great at getting things done. There was a time in my life when I was working three jobs, going to school, and raising two children. Throughout my adult life, I have generally been unwilling to stop “doing” unless I get so sick that I can’t do otherwise.
In the last few years, I have made great strides in stopping that behavior. Still, it is not lost on me that I have back problems which have impacted my level of activity since mid-February. While 97% of the time I am resting and doing what I know I should do, I still find myself saying, “Oh it’s okay if I plant a few seedlings.” Or I do other minor garden work when I know I should be avoiding all leaning over and bending down. What will it take for me to learn this lesson? I shudder to think of the answer.
Overthinking
I used to obsess about anything I wanted to say for so long that I often lost the opportunity to say it. I also obsessed about things I did say, analyzing my words looking for errors or wondering if I had said something that made me look stupid. While I stopped those behaviors decades ago, I believe that overthinking is still the most common way I make myself miserable. And it is certainly the source of most of my stress. If I am offended by something, I may fixate on it. Worrying about the future also leads me to overthinking. The fact that I avoid mind-slowing spiritual practices, such as meditation, perpetuates the problem.
***
I have long been aware of my tendency to overdo and overthink. In fact I have written about those behaviors before. (Recovering from Overdoing, Stay in the Present and Stop Thinking!) In the last month, awareness of another way I contribute to my dying has resurfaced.
Emotions such as anger, sadness and fear are meant to show us that there are problems we need to deal with. If we feel the feelings and address the issues, the emotions are likely to flow through us. If we repress them, we probably won’t solve the problems and we may become depressed, anxious or sick.
I have been conscious of the fear in my body for a long time, but I used to bury my anger so deep that I didn’t even realize it was there. Now I feel the anger at the time it is triggered. My new awareness is that I am repressing my grief.
***
Stuffing Grief
When I was growing up, a frequent message from my father was, “If you are going to cry, I will give you something to cry about.” If I didn’t stop crying, I was usually spanked or sent to my bedroom. I learned it was not okay for me to express my sadness.
When I met Amma in 1989, grief began to erupt from inside of me. Generally that grief was not associated with any conscious memory. Even though I didn’t know what it was related to, I often had a sense that I was releasing the energy from traumas that had occurred earlier in my life. Sometimes I wondered if some of it was coming from other lifetimes, or if it was some form of “universal grief.” That spontaneous release of tears, which usually occurred during Amma’s programs, went on for several years. Letting them pour out felt very healing.
Then one day someone teased me about my tears. My childhood programming took over and I shut them down so fast it was mind-boggling. From time to time, something will still bring up that deep well of grief inside of me, but for the most part it is nowhere to be found.
A week or so ago, there was a moment when I felt sadness about my back pain and the resulting physical limitations. I shed a tear, or maybe two, before a firm inner voice said, “It’s good that you felt your sadness, but that is ENOUGH.” I saw that my father’s message was still operating within me. Certainly no healing can come from releasing one or two tears.
When I heard the news that Prince had died, I started crying, and I cried on and off throughout the week. The grief I felt was so deep, very similar to the level of emotion I experienced during my early years with Amma. While Prince’s “Purple Rain” album and movie, and especially the song “When Doves Cry,” was important to me in the 80’s, I hadn’t followed his career after that, other than taking my children to his 1988 Seattle concert. Even though I didn’t understand my level of emotion, I was aware that the tears I shed felt cleansing and therapeutic.
***
I believe that overdoing, overthinking and stuffing my grief are the three biggest ways that I am currently contributing to my dying. I know it is important for me to continue working on these issues and to keep the “Will this action contribute to your living or your dying?” question in mind as I make day-to-day decisions as well as when I consider long term decisions, such as when to retire.
I have no way of knowing whether I will live one more day or one year, five years, ten years or more. I am committed to making the most of every moment I have left in this lifetime.
Originally Published on May 6, 2016 as part of The Seeker’s Dungeon’s On Living and Dying event.
If you’d like to be one of the guest authors, you can learn more about the event here: 365 Days On Living and Dying.
From January to March 2016, I offered a weekly Challenge for Growth Prompt. Participants published a post that related to the weekly topic and I posted a summary of those contributions. You will find that list below.
I give thanks to everyone who contributed to the challenges, whether it was by publishing a post, by reading the posts written by others or by thinking about the challenge topics as they lived their life that week.
Everyone is still welcome to write for Challenge for Growth Prompts. If you do, I will add you to the list of contributors. You will find the full prompt list below the contributors list. The directions for participating in a prompt can be found in each of the prompt descriptions. Continue reading “Challenge for Growth Prompts: January to March 2016”→
Over the last few years I have felt myself inching towards retirement. Last month, I set a retirement date of May 31, 2017 but the size of my psychotherapy practice has reduced so much lately that sometimes I feel as if I am already retired. I know that could change, but I don’t know if it will.
This transition time has been very interesting. When my ex-husband had a massive heart attack in 2001, we began to reconnect. Now we are regularly doing things together, such as watching Seahawks games and Dancing with the Stars, and occasionally going together to movies or other events. We have talked about contacting two or three of our friends from our pre-marriage days.
I also have reconnected with Kathie, who was a close friend in the mid-80’s to mid-90’s. I helped her start a blog last year, ChosenPerspectives, so we have that in common in addition to our past history.
I’ve noticed other things that could be related to this transition. Since 2005 or so, I have felt a drive to reduce the number of my belongings. While I have never been much interested in material possessions, I began to give away anything I hadn’t used in the last three years, unless there was some major reason to keep it. Last year, I changed that number to objects that I hadn’t used in the last two years. I also have had an ongoing desire to organize and clean out cupboards, shelves and drawers.
I have had a renewed interest in numerous activities that I enjoyed doing in the past, such as gardening and canning. For about a year, I felt pulled to buy a microscope, an item I loved during my childhood. When I realized that I could add microscopic photos to the nature photography I put on my blog, I bought a microscope and started using it immediately.
I’ve also developed new passions during the last few years. The most important is blogging, which has become a major part of my day-to-day life. As a result of our mutual blogging interest, I have much more contact with my son, who is the person responsible for me starting my blog. (His blog is The Seeker’s Dungeon.) As the result of blogging, I have also developed a passion for photography.
For several years, I have considered learning how to dehydrate vegetables and fruits. Last month, I purchased a dehydrator and started dehydrating bananas, mangoes, plums, tomatoes, zucchini, mushrooms, cucumbers (probably won’t do that again), and as of yesterday, watermelon. I’ve also felt the urge to start knitting, crocheting, sewing, and possibly folk dancing and going to Dances of Universal Peace, all activities I enjoyed decades ago. These could all be retirement activities.
When I am with Amma, the frequency of the synchronistic events that happen in my life increase dramatically. This summer was no different in that regard. A clear theme emerged in the course of those synchronicities.
The week before Amma arrived in Seattle, I was at my Network Chiropractor’s office when a woman walked out of the treatment room. She looked familiar. I did a quick 20 year age-progression in my mind and then asked if she was the person I thought she was. I was correct. The next week, the same thing happened, in the same place but with a different person. Again, the woman was someone I hadn’t seen since the mid-90’s.
When Amma came to Seattle, I spent the first morning she was here helping a staff member find and go to a dentist. I didn’t walk into the program hall until 1 p.m. As I was walking in, a woman was walking out. She called me by name. When I looked at her, I recognized that she was also someone who had been in my life in the early to mid-90’s. I hadn’t seen her since then and she told me she hadn’t attended one of Amma’s programs during the intervening years. I was amazed by the commonalities between all of these synchronistic experiences.
The most amazing reconnecting events happened just before and during Amma’s Toronto programs. On Father’s Day, I received an email from my brother saying that his son had written a Father’s Day post about our father, i.e. my nephew’s grandfather. Before I tell that story, and the events that followed, let me say that I left home to go to college when I was 17; my brothers were 12 and 14 at that time. I saw them very few times after that. My youngest brother died in 1992. (My children and I did visit him several times between the time he was diagnosed with cancer and the time he died.) I have seen my other brother only three times since 1992, and those visits were brief. We do email each other every now and then.
So back to the story at hand. It was fascinating to read my nephew’s post and to learn about my father from his perspective. Even more fascinating was that I discovered that my nephew and his wife are professional photographers and that my father had also had an interest in photography. My nephew posted some of my father’s photos in his Father’s Day tribute. I knew my father had taken some family pictures but this part of his life was completely unknown to me. It was particularly interesting to me because of my current interest in photography. I was discovering there are things I have in common with my family that I didn’t know anything about.
In his post, my nephew had referred to my father’s military life. Some of what he said was different than my memories. When I checked those things out with my brother, he put together a time line of my father’s career. There was information in it that I didn’t know, and I knew some things that he wasn’t aware of. We wrote back and forth over the next few days. At one point, he added his two sons to the email exchange, so I added my son and daughter. All of us made a comment or two on the joint exchange and then the four cousins wrote each other separately. This was the first conversations they had ever had with each other. I marveled at the miracle that was unfolding.
Over the next week or so, my brother and I continued emailing each other about our childhood memories. He mentioned that he thought our father had gifted us with a love of music, books, education, hard work and the desire to do things right. I believe we also learned the value of hard work and education from our mother and even more important, the value of being in service to others.
I still don’t know my surviving brother well but over the years I have learned that we share some of the same political beliefs. Recently, I learned that we are both introverts and have similar thoughts about some religious issues. Since he is a landscape architect I assume we share a love of nature.
While I was pondering all of these commonalities, I realized that my current passion about nature is something I have in common with my youngest brother, even though we didn’t have that focus at the same time. His room, both as a teenager and a young adult, was always filled with injured birds and other animals he had rescued and was nursing back to health. I remember visiting him before he married. At that time, he was raising snakes in his room. I will never forget this piece he wrote just prior to his death at age 39:
I am very sad that people seem to see so little of the world around them. I can’t walk outside without seeing the beauty of our created world, from the rainbow in a line of earthworm slime, to another visible ring on Jupiter. We have been given this magnificent world to study and enjoy in limitless detail at any level, microscopic to cosmic. Even though I have enough things to interest me another 10 lifetimes, I must take solace in knowing that, at least compared to others, I’ve had much more than my share even in half a life time..
As I approach retirement, I am grateful that a natural transition seems to be occurring. I am reconnecting with my past in many different ways. I have no doubt that I will have enough activities that I am passionate about to keep me occupied for years to come. The unanswered question that is most up for me now concerns where I will ultimately live: “Will I move to India?” “Will I live in one of Amma’s U.S. Centers?” ” Will I continue to live in my own house in Seattle?” Those answers, and the answers to many other questions, are yet to be revealed. At this moment, there is no need for me to know the future. I know I will know what I need to know when the time is right!
I once heard a story about a monkey who decided to give up eating bananas. Even though the monkey was committed to his goal, when he saw a banana in a tree far away, he decided to sit closer to it. That way he could at least enjoy looking at it. Nothing wrong with that!
Soon, he decided to move even closer to the banana. And then closer. And then closer yet. Before long he was sitting right next to it. At that point, the monkey reached over and grabbed, peeled and ate the banana, telling himself that he would give up bananas “tomorrow.”
I often use that story when talking to my psychotherapy clients about breaking their addictive patterns. If you have the addictive substance, such as drugs, alcohol, a particular type of food, porn, etc., in close proximity to you, it is unlikely you will be able to keep your commitment to abstain.
That is the way I am about chocolate. Dark chocolate to be specific. A little dark chocolate can be healthy, but if I have some, I usually want more. If it is in the house, and it comes to my mind, it won’t be long before I go looking for it. Once it is in plain sight, forget about abstaining, I will do that “tomorrow.”
I don’t intend to ever give up dark chocolate completely, but when I am serious about stopping my over-indulgence, I know to not have it in the house and before I leave the house to recommit to myself not seek it out.
(Note: At the moment, I’m congratulating myself for choosing to use a photo of a monkey eating a banana for this post rather than a photo of a piece of dark chocolate. That way, every time I see this post in the future, I won’t be tempted to go buy some!)
I enjoy looking at the work of new bloggers. Today I discovered Rajaraman and his “Raja’s Short Stories” blog. The two short stories of his that I read today were well written and really held my interest. They also contained meaningful lessons about life. I decided to reblog this one so you can all get a sense of his work. Join me in welcoming Rajaraman to the WordPress blogging community!
“Enough of all this. Shut up, this is not working out.” Rishi said.
“Yeah, I knew this would never work out.” said Naina.
Their marriage had become strained over the past few years. They weren’t spending enough time with each other. The sweet talks had vanished. Their relationship had become more or less like a chore. The passion was missing.
But they did fight with passion. They loved themselves more than the other person. They didn’t care for each other’s opinion or point of view.
They finally felt that they were nearing their end.
“Oh God. Why did I marry her? Please relieve me of this pain.” he thought.
“The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.” “Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none.” “Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.”-William Shakespeare
Living, Learning and Letting Go 
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