Last Minute Emotions

Yesterday, I had an intense Hakomi therapy session. By the time I reached the evening, and I was getting ready to go out to socialize, I was frozen. I felt "ok" most of the day, and didn't see this freezing up coming. It was clear I had some processing to do, and couldn't go out. But why then? Why at the last minute?

How Was Your Trip?

side of a truck that's been graffitied, paris, june 2013

It's the first question I get upon returning from Europe each summer.
Sometimes I get it when I take smaller teaching trips - Toronto, Chicago, even.
But there's nothing quite like being gone for five weeks to Europe.

It's a fair question to ask. A kind one. And one I often don't want to answer. Here's why.

Gaining and Losing, or, What Gets Lost Part Two

The title of my post on losing weight wasn't called Gaining and Losing, but that was the topic.

I got many responses - comments on the blog and also over email - people noting that they, too, had in some ways had mixed feelings about losing weight. I barely addressed what I meant by that, though, and a few folks were curious. So here it goes, an attempt to get at the nuances of those "emotions stored in fat" that I was talking about...

First, please hop over to Praying Horse to read her comments, as I'd basically be repeating them.
What I have encountered is that, on a literal, external level, I have surely used fat as something to hide behind; something to blame when I am feeling sad, something to excuse self-hatred or explain it. For example, I often tell Dylan that the first sign of depression (meaning, not of emotion, but of emotions being shoved under) is me talking about or thinking about how much I hate my body. I could be the same weight as yesterday and a week before, but the "hatred" arises out of discomfort with more than my body - with emotions, in particular. So on the surface level, the fat shelters me from my own emotions, and on a surface level, I have to deal with them more, face my self-hatred for instance, if it can't hide in my fat, metaphorically.

On an inner level, I definitely rank as an emotional eater: eating when bored, sad, scared; when feeling empty, angry, tired.

But on a secret level, the relationship between fat and emotions goes even deeper for me. This is where Praying Horse's comments really come into play. There's no science, and I am not purporting a theory, rather, talking about the emotional/physical response and my intuitive feelings about connection. The way to say it that feels right to me is something like:
As I am losing weight, I am burning through old emotions that are stored IN that fat.
I have literally had dreams of childhood or adolescence, flashbacks to emotional states, and been triggered by things that haven't triggered me in a long time. This also means the positive emotions, too: felt a happiness and calm, a peace and resilience (from time to time) that I hadn't felt in a long time. Where are these coming from? Intuitively I don't think they are coming from the *fact* of losing weight as much as, as I said above, what is stored in the weight.

I did acid when I was younger on and off for a couple of years. The going theory about acid flashbacks, which I no longer suffer but did for a few years after, is that they are stored in fat. If you burn that fact, the flashbacks are released. This is the intuitive image in my mind for this weight loss/emotion gain process. It ups the ante, means I am dealing with more, and more directly, and need to not cover it over with food.

So the process of exposure, of rawness, of losing my shell and opening up, feeds itself. It's very akin to meditation, what Chogyam Trungpa calls "being processed" - eg cooked. This imagery is powerful for me as well, for obvious reasons. Cooking breaks down the chemicals, softens the walls, makes the food more digestable, palatable, even flavorful. My emotions in the last months have been like food, for sure: juicy like steak, mashed like potatoes, crisp like salad.

As I burn through layers of both my hiding in weight and also hiding from myself in eating, as well as burning through the emotions buried in the fat, I'll keep writing about it. For now, though I wanted to say a bit more about it, so you'd actually hear the experience a bit more clearly.

Any others who have experienced something akin to this, please comment. Thanks for reading.

What Gets Lost?

(Image of me at a student's farm teaching a retreat this last weekend,
by Dayna Flores)

"If you lose your mind, come back again"
A slogan from Shambhala Sun Camp

For over a month now, Dylan and I have been doing Weight Watchers. The first couple of weeks were awkward - adjusting to their point system, shocked by how little or much certain things "cost" me. But once I got used to it (and, in fact, went on 10 day retreat where I couldn't enter my info onto the online app or system all the time, which is how you really keep track if you are doing it online rather than "in person" meetings, but still somehow did pretty well, intuitively) it really made sense to me. It still does. There's a sense of how much something "costs" us financially, as always, can we afford to eat out, if so, how much, etc. Then there's now also a sense of what "costs" us physically - I worked out, I have some extra points saved up, so we can go to Culver's if we don't go out again this week anywhere with more than salads.

I like this way, frankly. I have tried "diets" with "calorie counting" before and it hasn't worked - too much to keep track of. This makes it simpler, and comes at a time when, due to Dylan reducing work hours to keep his sanity and assist me in my "business" side of teaching, we are on a tighter financial budget, too. As we buckle down on eating out to save money, we buckle down also on eating to save calories, fat, and weight. So far Dylan has lost 12 pounds, and I've lost 10.

"33 for 33" is our mutual goal - we both turned 33 this year, and losing 33 pounds for each of us would put us both in "healthy range" for our heights, etc, from where we were when we started. But as friends have pointed out, the benefits of WW are long-lasting - even if you don't consciously or electronically "track" your "expenditures" you become far more aware of costs and gains.

I feel it's a bit like a game, actually. Move this here, like Tetris, and weight will drop.
; )
There's strategy for sure - eat as many veggies as you want, basically, because they cost "nothing" in comparison to french fries. And so on, and so on...

This week a "hidden" gain/loss has come up - and it's a bit of both. A feeling of sadness, disconnect with my body has emerged - old trauma mixed with new stories and struggles. I have heard over the years about all that we carry in fat - hormones, emotions, toxins - and I wonder, can't help but wonder, if both literally and metaphorically I am losing some of the weight, the hidden fears and secrets, issues and suffering, that had trapped itself in my extra weight. Or even more likely, losing weight is taking away my barriers, my protection from these darker, harder places, all of which are centered around body image and body hurt. So far it actually feels harder, worse, than it has in awhile - I commented to Dylan that I am more aware now of how "fat" I feel because I am losing weight than I was while I was stuck at one place and in denial - but also real and raw, as if I am ready to work with all of this energy that's been caught inside me.

Food for thought, literally.

My Lungs Are My Heart

The verdict is in. Between massage, acupuncture and sickness in the last three weeks, it's become apparent to me that the upside-down lobed leaf shape of my lungs is actually the heart here in my body. The heart, more shaped like a tangle of weaving, must be doing something else, because my lungs are doing all of the feeling.

Last night, after a forum at the Overture Center on Miksang, a few of us went out for a drink at Nick's on State. A massage therapist was there, and a couple of the folks had gone to a talk the night before done by a neuroscientist who claimed, amongst other things, that we really are just a skin apart from each other, if that. Our energy is barely contained - hostile or helpful - and we can show this with brain scans for the non-believers who won't get anything out of seeing a psychic or getting Reiki done. The massage therapist mentioned how the body holds memories, how doing work on a person can literally release a memory from the body and one can "feel to heal" through having skillful massage done on them. Someone asked if everyone stores memories in the same places - all childhood trauma in place x, for instance - and she said no, but some trends (and I was thinking in my mind, like chakras) show up similar places - grief in the (no, don't say it) lungs, for instance.

I've known this for a long time. My very first acupuncturist at 19 told me that lungs were the center of grief in the body, since I would come to him again and again with respiratory problems. It often wasn't the sensation my heart breaking, but the clutter of so many losses filling my lungs with phlegm that would finally drive me to get help. My lungs would not lie, since the body does not lie, and even if I ignored the stories, the tears would - and still do - get stuck there, causing me to stop and rest and breathe through it.

A few weeks ago I went to New Mexico for a mega combination trip - two weekends of teaching Miksang in ABQ, one week in Taos with Natalie Goldberg (last of the intensive) and then a week of vacation with Dylan, passing from Taos to Santa Fe and back to ABQ to teach. I was very stressed upon departure - neck and shoulders, which are my pre-lung problem areas, very tense and locked up. I tried to get a massage in ABQ, but it fell through, then didn't schedule one until too late, so it wasn't until I'd been in New Mexico for over a week that someone finally broke up all the muscles (with a small contribution a couple of days before by a retretant friend) and tension. It turned out, as is often the case in Taos, that the masseuse is an energy worker, psychic and massage therapist, so she put all her senses to work, noting my feet were holding something back and that I am "strongly sensitive" (ah, yes). When she got to my lungs and chest, shoulders and neck, she said: "You have a lot of sadness in there," she ended, and she was right.
My body responded and let it all go, which she noted was wonderful but also likely to cause some post-massage messiness.

Did it ever. I spent all of the rest of the weekend, the end of the retreat, crying. By the time we got to Sunday night, the last night of the retreat, I felt feverish and stuffed. By Monday morning I was full-on sick; dizzy, coughing, sore throat and clogged sinuses. Dylan arrived that afternoon and I did my best to keep up with introducing him to everyone and entertaining, but by Tuesday I was totally worn. We did a modified version of the activities we had hoped to do in Taos, and as we went down the mountains into Santa Fe and ABQ, I limited my contribution to the trip to driving. No hiking, no supporting the local businesses or seeing all the art of Santa Fe. Just resting, crying, mourning the loss of my vacation and my inability to process the grief of the ending retreat because I was, ironically, sick. Sick in the lungs, by the next weekend, coughing so hard I woke with well-defined abs after the third night of being up hacking late.

Returning home, where my heart really is the most at ease, even with loving hosts in all three cities in New Mexico, has calmed a lot of the cough. After a week of sleeping a lot but also hurrying to catch up on things the cold left me behind on last week, I finally got to acupuncture today. Cupping and poking, essential oils and some herbs are already helping to thin the last of it and put me back into balance. When I mentioned to the acupuncturist that I have often had respiratory problems in my life, she smiled. "Sensitive people often do," she said, and that's when the image of my lungs being my heart came to mind. Lungs, the inside skin, the way the oxygen that eventually feeds the heart even enters. Lungs are the sleeves of our inner organs, our first defenses and most publicly reached inner place. I wear my heart on my sleeve; breathing in whatever hurts me and whatever helps me almost too easily. At least they are as much a benefit as a cold bug catching grief basket.

Going Home?

I dream often of a mixed-together Madison-Appleton. In the dream I am thinking of going home, to the house I have owned in Madison for 6.5 years now, and accidentally, the house I grew up in pops into mind, still as was last I saw the inside of it over 12 years ago. They become one and I can't tell where I am. Bedrooms swap with each other so the home in my dream is a mix of both, and sometimes that becomes lucid dreaming - so lucid even when I am awake I feel as if I never left the dream.

Often it is very painful for me to go to Appleton. I've managed to go home (see, I said it, though I meant to write "there") almost annually for my nephew's birthday party in August, going the long way around on 441 so I don't have to tread too familiar territory from "back then." But of course he and his mother live perilously close to the complex where the first boy I kissed and a few friends after inhabited, the street name for my nephew's house even the same as a costume the boy was wearing when I met the ex-boyfriend.

The only time I can go into the city proper and not lose my shit is when I am shut down, turned off. I went back for a reading with Erika last August and since we went into just a new cafe - Harmony - I hadn't been in before because it's relatively new, and because Erika kept me busy by chatting with me and having her own reactions to going back (she's from the same area), I managed to get through ok. And I let that convince me that going back this time, while I was in the area teaching my online creative writing class to Junior High kids and meeting with them in person in Oshkosh (at the same tech college my dad finished his career out at before dying; though I never visited him at that building, luckily!), would be ok.

I knew a couple of days before it wasn't going to be ok. My guts got wobbly and my skin began to itch. My neck, which has been well-behaved lately because I have consciously worked on my stress and anxiety levels, ratcheted up into a totally frozen spasm. Even with the treat of meeting Helen Boyd on my schedule - she just happens to be living in Appleton at the moment! - I still knew it wasn't going to be pretty. I booked myself a hotel room in Fond du Lac (mis-estimating how far it is from Appleton - it was so much cheaper than Oshkosh, but not worth the extra drive!) with hot tub on premise and made the first leg of the drive just fine.

On the way to Sheboygan, my partner's hometown, we drive through Fond du Lac, so although Schreiner's Restaurant (intersection of 23/41 - Johnson St) is on my map of Fox Valley's loaded memories, I am used to it. But as soon as I began to head up past Oshkosh (pretty neutral place, which is why I took the gig - I don't see myself ever taking one in Appleton, though one of my students lives there and half of them go to school in Kimberly), the world started to get pretty weird.

It's a well-worn analog, but the best I can say is that it's a little like being on LSD, which I did a fair amount of in high school in that town. I saw the exit I used to take to my best friend's house (two exits, depending on if I were coming from north or south) and began to cry, quite spontaneously and with great misery. Everything that I saw, and often things I had forgotten about - AutoTrust on Oneida were I got my first Saab worked on after my mom died, the Walgreen's where Anne worked in High School, Between the Locks where we often had post-show food and drink - carried a whole world that would open up quickly, flash itself to me, then disappear.

It was an experience like this I had coming over the darkened N. Oneida bridge, catching myself peering high over my steering wheel for the Appleton "skyline" in which the two worlds - Madison, coming over John Nolen going North; Appleton, coming south over the Skyline Bridge crossing the Fox River - merged. The flash was like a living dream, two consciousnesses and a couple of subconsciousnesses, for good measure. I jerked the wheel without trying and then caught myself again and the tears came anew.

Once inside the cafe I was ok - I knew that would be the case and told myself as much as soon as the bridge bit passed. Even after that, going to Pat's Tap, a familiar place, I could handle myself ok. Heid's Music, Avenue Jewelry Shop - lots of the same places remained along that stretch, but I was settled in, returned to my skin, awake and out of the dream of then, thoroughly in the present with Helen.

My apologies to Appletonians whom I would quite like to see - this was an experimental visit and as you can see it was a bit tender, to say the least. Seeing a new face helped a lot; let's hope I can see old faces in the future and have that ground me, too.

I was exhausted come Friday afternoon, driving into the sunset (ugh) after teaching the kids in Oshkosh. But when I turned that last corner - avoiding the John Nolen Bridge, not needing a flashback - around Pug Mahones and into my driveway, I felt a relief and deep belief that the trip did help to settle a couple of things for sure - THIS is my home, even if that WAS, and in a certain sense, always will be; a first lover, the first kiss, those people don't ever stop being your firsts. But this is my home now. The cats and Dylan make sure I know that without a doubt, and I love them for it.

Muscle Connects to Bone, Bone is Filled With Marrow

(title is a lyric from St. Vincent)

Outside, the first layer of sticking snow covers all the horizontal surfaces and clings to those half between up and down and side to side, like my 45 degree roof. Inside my body, all the connections adjust to the new cold, another 10-20 degrees lower than it has been previously, and my eyes contract with the new light reflected by all the whiteness out there. I feel the snow and winter sink deeply inside of me. It's an intimate feeling, my thirty-second rendition of this in a life of living in Wisconsin - except for the one year I was in the south of France for their farce version of "winter".

Rich foods fill my blood with the fats and minerals needed to keep warm from the inside out for the next three months. Others complain, but I look forward to the sustained spaciousness of this new visual world, and the chance to turn inward - mentally, emotionally, physically - and restore.

When It Rains...

I managed to pull a weird muscle in my eye last night crying.
Behind my eye, of course. Eyeballs don't have muscles.

I remember in High School when my theater group took a trip to NYC for the first time, and Luke, one of the actors, got a burst blood vessel during the flight due to sudden changes in pressure. He said it didn't hurt, but it looked like hell. Blood floating all over his eye, but inside the cornea. Trippy.

Dylan couldn't see anything burst or pulled or off in my forehead or eye last night, but maybe that's just because I was crying. I woke this morning and the pain was gone. When we talked about it this morning I joked that maybe I cried so hard because it finally rained last night - for the first time in almost a month. Nada, nothing; cloudy days but no rain, for 21 days. It was such a relief last night, walking back with the in laws from dinner, to feel a cool breeze, some dampness on my skin, the smell of fall made that much huskier by the wet air. I guess my eyes needed some rain, too.

There's nothing like having a strong set of feelings come out with direct no trigger to bring meditation, writing or any kind of mindfulness practice to play. Thich Naht Hahn has said something to this effect (what Buddhist teacher hasn't?) - but he said it so well. That we can learn and learn all we want, but it isn't until the crap hits the fan that we actually really begin to practice. A friend of mine who runs a used bookstore in Appleton and was the first to publish my poetry, would always tell me, as a teenager, "It's good you're in pain; write from that." I never understood it then, but now, thinking so much lately about how deep feelings really help - strange to say but true - jerk us into the moment, to be here NOW, if we let them - us make direct contact with our lives. This doesn't mean I seek being in pain, but when it happens, it can actually be a gift. Even if a funny one.

We joked about this lightly yesterday, after the Harvest of Peace address at the Shambhala Center, as I was having 10 different "Madame Director" conversations at once while also putting away lots of gear - zafus and folding tables and digital projector, oh my! - and someone accidentally squished my finger between two heavy tables. I went from being overwhelmed and multitasking to being in very sharp pounding pain within two seconds. I yelped and she moved it, and I began to laugh. "I bet you're really here now," someone said, and I laughed more, "I even saw it coming, and didn't stop it!" and we all began to guffaw as if someone had just told the funniest joke in the world.

Maybe the only reason why feelings seem so overwhelming is that once we have opened that gate, let one or two in, a whole mess can come in at once. It's like meditation, when we leave so much space so that our mind can reign free and let go for a bit. The bits of mind usually hiding under the surface come in to play, too. Suddenly it seems as if we are "thinking" more when in fact we are thinking the same amount, just noticing it more. Maybe feelings are the same. Piggybacking, interdependent feelings accompanying the distinct sadness of a severe crying jag, or anger of a screaming match. The clown car of emotions - fit them all in at once. Who knows when the next opening will come.

So today I am letting whatever is left drift out. I have my suspicions of the things that "set me off," and read a chunk of Courage to Heal last night to help work gently through those. The chapter on feelings reminded me that I don't get to control them, that they come when I least expect them and often all mixed up. The best I can do is give them space.

True Blue

PMS. Pre-Menstrual Syndrome. Syndrome - syn/drone. I act the same every time, or my emotions seem to be the same and I respond in habit. Which is the syndrome part? The hormones?
Drome
Mone

My response is to get sad, always has been.

The trees on our block are already starting to change. The first to go, I see just now, is the yellow Honey Locust on the corner which gets the most of the setting sun before it disappears off the trees on our street. The yellow makes the blue sky more blue. How is that?

I tell my Miksang students that - "colors contrast each other," I say, then "contrast is part of how we see. We see one thing because it is not another." Aviva, who is currently chasing a fly, sees the fly because there is not-fly around the fly. Funny, but without the not-fly, she wouldn't really be seeing fly.

I could make all kinds of profound comments here about how it's because of joy that sadness can be seen, appreciated. But that's not really what I mean to say. I mean to say something more subtle than that, and the PMS itself, which is triggering washes of sadness the last twenty-four hours, blocks my ability to be clear about it.

So this afternoon I took a nap. Hung out in the not-fly space so that when I awoke, the fly of sadness in my face wasn't quite such a nag. No story, I said to myself, there's no story here. Just a feeling. See it and let it be.

This is true blue. Not pining after an obsession, not making up stories about depression. This clear bell of feeling, tolling in my heart, which changes almost minutely every second I can sense it, this is true blueness.

Great Eastern Sun - imagery from Shambhala to represent our basic goodness. We talk about the clouds which cover it, our concepts and aggression. But what about the sky, the space that holds it? I'd like to think this kind of feeling is that kind of space - not tainted, not biased, ever-changing but very sensitive, like film, to the world, to perceptions, to experience. And mostly blue - the world is a hard, sad place - and yet, that's not a bad thing.