Category: Inspiration

Don’t Stop

Published on by gwenborgLeave a comment

“Run as fast as you possibly can at any given moment, and don’t stop.”  I repeated this phrase to myself thousands of times over the course of the four hours, two minutes and 13 seconds it took me to complete the New York Marathon in November 2001, just six weeks after hijacked airplanes toppled the World Trade Centers right across the Hudson from the start of the race.   This being my third New York Marathon, I knew that it would be different from the two before because every marathon is a new experience, but I had no idea that showing up to participate would turn out to have as much of an impact as did finishing the race itself.

Living in Los Angeles, I had felt almost entirely detached from the events of September 11th.  Of course witnessing it “live” on CNN, I felt profoundly sad and horrified, but in that “saw it on TV” kind of way.  We sat in our comfortable living room on one of the most beautiful Southern California September mornings and watched the clips play over and over for hours, waiting to see what would happen next, but not feeling any sense of personal danger or fear.  Then, to get our toddler out of the house, we went to the playground by the beach.  It was empty…and beautiful.  Our family and friends were safe and accounted for, and our lives were not immediately disrupted.  I have never felt more disconnected from the rest of the world then I did at that very minute.  So standing on Staten Island in the crowd of 25,000 waiting for Mayor Guliani to share a word of encouragement and sound the gun to start the race, I felt fear for the first time.  Myopically, I wondered if the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge would blow up when we crossed it?

It didn’t.  The crowd got moving quickly and I began to settle into my marathon mode.  “Not too fast, you don’t want to burn out …Shake out your arms and stretch your neck…I hope my son’s OK with the babysitter…Please let me get back to him quickly…Take off your hat and throw it on the dumpster ahead…and so it went for the first few miles.  My running pace was entirely erratic and undisciplined.  I watched the timer clock as each mile passed.  More than ten minutes for the first mile, then an eight minute mile…eight-and-a-half minutes…seven minutes and fifty seconds…and so on.  I knew this was faster than my usual pace and that I probably couldn’t keep it up for the whole race.  I also knew that this kind of erratic pace made me a dreadful running partner, but that didn’t turn out to matter.  I lost track of my husband in the first quarter mile when he stopped to pee.  My in-laws, preferring a slow and steady pace, hung back and disappeared into the crowd by the end of the first mile.  Even my best friend and running partner of 15 years got a stitch in her side at mile six and said I should go on without her.  So, there I was, mother of a not-yet-two-year-old, casually trained, and coaxing myself through the marathon alone.

It’s often said that marathon running is 10% physical and 90% mental.  In my own experience, I have found this to be entirely true.  As the time wore on and everything began to ache, my body begged for relief, but I was determined not to drop out.  After all, my friends were watching my progress on the Internet and I had told so many people I was going to do this, I couldn’t not finish.  Not to mention the fact that my son was at my friend’s place with a new babysitter and I was desperate to get home to him.  In this marathon, like none other before, I found a powerful new voice inside, coaching me to “run as fast as you possibly can at any given moment, and, don’t stop.”

As I ran with my head down staring at the pavement before me to avoid an emotional reaction to the crowds that would derail my breathing pattern and preclude my completion of the race, I found myself in need of very different motivations at different times.  Sometimes I would get a rush of euphoria and energy thinking of crossing the finish line, of how good the bath after the marathon would feel.  Then, seconds later, I’d realize there were still so many miles to go and feel an overwhelming desire to quit right then and there, sure that I couldn’t finish.  My mantra worked under both these circumstances.  When I was feeling energetic, I picked up the pace moving more quickly toward that goal I had in mind.  For those times I wanted to quit, the second half of it, and, don’t stop became a bottom line as I shuffled along at a snails pace, but moving just the same.

Brooklyn, for me, is the best part of the race.  I’m still feeling good enough to look around and enjoy the bands and the crowds.  I love Lafayette Street and all the children who come to cheer us on.  The mixture of reggae blaring from 4th floor windows and Hassidic Jewish families dressed in somber black coats, but always with chairs to sit for the duration, I find incredibly invigorating.  I am amazed by how many fire stations there are along the route in Brooklyn, and how many firemen are out cheering us on.  The first ten miles pass in a blur and, just as the first wave of fatigue arrives, the crowds die out and we move into Queens for the most silent and solitary phase of the marathon.  The red carpet on the Pulaski Bridge signals the approaching half marathon mark, a huge milestone.  I cross the half marathon at one hour, fifty-eight minutes and change.  If I keep up this pace I’ll beat four hours!  Now I have a bigger goal, but a lot of work ahead of me.

In the three NY marathons I have run over the years, the end of the Queensboro Bridge as it empties out into Manhattan to the roars of the largest crowd along the entire route is always the most difficult part for me.  On the one hand, I’ve finally reached Manhattan and the marathon is technically more than half over.  On the other hand, I know miles of 1st avenue lay before me, and a dismal trek through upper Manhattan and the Bronx separates me from the Central Park finish line that, as the crow flies, is only blocks away.  I always hyperventilate a bit as I come over the bridge.  I think it’s partly being overwhelmed by the crowds and partly the road ahead that does it, but I find I really have to put my head down and block out all noise around me to keep my breathing steady and even (this compared to my friend who enjoys socializing, munching on bananas, sipping beer and stopping to chat right at that spot).   I find hunkering down and focusing on the road ahead to be my only recourse for this mental hurdle.  I make it up 1st avenue, across the Willis Avenue Bridge into the Bronx and round the turn back into Harlem, realizing I’ve reached the ultimate mental battle of the race.

The last four miles are excruciating.  Not only do I have the requisite fatigue and sore toes, but I’m also getting a strange ache in my stomach every time I run downhill.  I find myself wondering if I could be causing permanent damage that might preclude producing a sibling for my son?  My mind plays heavy, powerful tricks to try to coax me to stop running and drop out of the race.  The pressure to quit is relentless, even down to the last quarter mile I struggle to keep going, but my mantra is stronger.  It’s amazing the clarity that can go hand-and-hand with pain and struggle.  The constant stream of thoughts, the monkey mind, disappears, replaced by a clear focus on and don’t stop.  Simple.  Then, with the finish line finally in site, a flood of euphoria comes over me and I pick up the pace, take off my sunglasses and raise my arms in victory sprinting to the finish line as if I had run a fifty-yard dash.

Exhausted and elated, I finished and achieved a personal best time for the NY Marathon, though I missed my goal of beating four hours by just over two minutes. As I file out with hundreds of other runners, I reflect on the marathon itself and my accomplishment.  In the initial minutes following the end of the race, it is all about me.  How exciting it had been… How proud I am to have finished…  How great my finish line photo will be… How terrific the celebration dinner will be… How to cut out of the line and get to 85th Street as fast as I can… How sore my legs are already.

Yet, as the immediate euphoria subsides, a new sensation begins to creep in.  Throughout the marathon, I had kept emotion at bay, trying to push aside any thoughts of sadness or personal grief of my fellow runners or spectators.  Now, with the luxury of the race behind me, I allow myself to absorb the sites I had witnessed along the way.    I had heard stories before the race started of people running in memory of friends who had died in the attacks, but nothing had prepared me to run along side a man wearing a t-shirt listing dozens of friends he knew and lost, or a single photograph of a loved one bobbing ridiculously on the back of a runner’s t-shirt.  As we passed fire trucks seemingly every mile or two, hoards of firemen stood outside the trucks cheering us on.  I couldn’t believe they were clapping for us. They were the heroes – we should have been clapping for them, and many of us were.    There were hundreds of signs thanking us for showing up, and more expressions of solidarity and patriotism than I had ever seen displayed before.  American flags decorated the route and the runners.  Collectively, we were a diversion for the morning, a few hours off from the weight of grief that hung palpably over the city.

Looking back more than a decade later, I realize that in many ways, I ran the marathon in the same way I witnessed the events of September 11th; with detachment.   Not as the result of apathy, but as an ultimate defense mechanism.  Maybe deciding to get on a plane when the country was at high alert and go to New York to run the marathon was, in my own way, an effort to be present there and to gain some kind of understanding and connection to an event that was so defining for the world, but seemed so unreal to me?  These days we all face busy, overscheduled personal lives, an over-heating planet, crumbling financial markets and struggling politicians.  We’re bombarded with so much daily tragedy that we are becoming desensitized to the grief and suffering of others. The magnitude of these challenges coupled with the entertaining formats via which they are conveyed, makes it easy to sit back and watch the spectacle with detachment, as I did that day.  Opting out altogether is the most comfortable option, but also the most vacant.  I’m beginning to see that making the conscious decision to participate rather than just sit back and watch, might just turn out to be the greatest accomplishment of all.

Dharma Weekend

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Attending a conference outside one’s own professional field is always a humbling experience, but never more so than one expounding on the finer points of an ancient religion whose ultimate goal is the cessation of views.  Such was my experience last weekend at the Buddhist Meditative Praxis:  traditional teachings & modern application conference at Hong Kong University’s Centre of Buddhist Studies.  In my opinion, the conference divided into three distinct groups: those who meditate, those who study those who meditate, and those who study what those who meditate study.  The room was filled with monks, scientists and scholars.

Knowing next to nothing about Buddhism, my interest fell squarely in the middle camp, neuroscience, which turned out to be a bit of a pariah at this conference.  Buddhists and scholars expressed the opinion that measuring the meditating brain was entirely missing the point, but it was the reason I wanted to attend.  The presence on the speaker line-up of two of my favorite thinkers in the mindfulness space, Mark Williams and Rick Hanson, was the initial draw of the conference for me.  Oxford Professor Mark Williams was instrumental in developing Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) and getting the British government to recognize it as an NHS-approved treatment for depression and suicide prevention.  Rick Hanson of the Wellspring Institute in California moderated an impressive on-line series “Compassion and the Brain” I watched last year and has recently published a new book, so I was eager to hear them both speak again.  Beyond these two I did not recognize any of the speakers on the roster.

My learning curve on the first day was beyond steep.  Kicking off with “On the curriculum in the monastic universities in the 10th century,” a talk given by a European scholar of Buddhism, all I understood was that existent bad luck causes the black cat to cross our path, not the other way around.  That one was comprehensible compared to the next paper on the canonical anapauassatisutta and the sources of the 16 stages in four tetrads, or something of the sort.   I think he concluded that whether the first breath is a long one in, or a short one out, is indeterminable, but don’t quote me on that.  From the next distinguished speaker, I simply wrote “No freakin’ idea what he’s talking about” in my notebook.  Though his English was fluent, he might as well have been speaking his native German for all I understood of this paper on The Case of the Four Applications of Mindfulness in Vajrayana. Likewise, when Professor Yao read his paper on whether or not meditative objects exist and I read along, I could only grasp that the existence of blue is debatable, and I’m not even sure about that.  The ontological status of meditative objects had me reflecting on the ontological status of my presence in the same room with these people.  This was not going well for me.  I jest with all due respect and recognition that my ignorance is the problem here, not the presentations.

Just as I was about to throw in the towel and hit the latest coffee shop in Sai Ying Pun, a scientist hit the stage.  Phew.   Now this was language I could begin to wrap my brain around (never thought I’d say that!).   She described careful studies comparing the differing effects of Focused Attention Meditation versus Loving Kindness Meditation and their associations with changes in the attention regions of the brain and cognitive empathy in the dorsal affective system respectively.  See… plain and simple.

Dr. Mark Williams described depression, the high likelihood of relapse and the successful use of MBCT to treat it.  Depression is a highly recurrent illness that starts early in life and affects an alarming number of people. Roughly 20% of the population is at risk of suffering depression at some point in life, and the most common age of onset is between 13-15 years old. This is an epidemic that needs attention, and MBCT is one of the most promising treatments available.  Dr. Williams’ research has shown that MBCT, which combines ancient Buddhist praxis with psycho-education about depression, is as effective as antidepressants in treating traumatic cases of depression.

Dr. Rick Hanson’s presentation was philosophical and much more rooted in the Buddhist tradition, as he bridges the two realms as a practitioner and a scientist. He teaches us to “Use the mind to change the brain to change the mind for the better.”  Of most interest in his speech to me was a discussion of the negativity bias that has been trained into humans.  Because sticks are more consequential than carrots, we learned evolutionarily to avoid sticks more fervently than to remember carrots.  Therefore, we imprint negative experiences and forget positive ones.  So, taking time to reflect on positive experiences to ensure that they, too, get transferred to long-term memory is important.  This was not the deepest message of his talk, but it was the one that resonated most with me.

Two hands on my bag, I was ready to make a quick exit to get home to my family before dinner, but then Venerable Sik Hin Hung took the stage.  Dressed in a grey robe with wire spectacles and a shaved head, the venerable was engaging, informative and thought-provoking in his presentation that brought it all together for me.  His theory was that many mindfulness programs have shown positive results in cognitive improvement, but that they have secularized teachings of Buddhism in order to make them palatable to wider audiences.  In so doing, he theorized, they have removed the essence of the teachings and lost something.  He and his colleagues set out to carefully design a study to determine if Sense Of Coherence (SOC) — comprehensibility, manageability and meaningfulness — a measure of well-being developed by Aaron Antonovsky, could be positively impacted by the study of meditation AND the tenants of Buddhism.   Working with teenage students about to take a rigorous standardized test, his study demonstrated that, in fact, those who studied Buddhism along with meditation techniques and then went on to pass the Buddhism exam showed positively better SOT than both those who did just mediation and those who did no meditation or Buddhist teaching.   This presentation was the biggest teaching point of the conference for me.  Welcoming the new, the measurable, the scientific, but cautioning that mindfulness uncoupled from the original tenants of Buddhism might have unintended consequences.

Buddha said, “Let us rise up and be thankful, for if we didn’t learn a lot today, at least we learned a little, and if we didn’t learn a little, at least we didn’t get sick, and if we got sick at least we didn’t die; so, let us be thankful.”   Reflecting on the conference, I am thankful for the opportunity to witness the coming together of earnest faith, thought, reflection and hard work in a search for greater understanding by some and a reminder by others that understanding might not be the point.

My Kind of Revolution

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On paper, a personal revolution fit perfectly between Golden Week and the last day of school before summer vacation. A revolution that fit around real life sounded like the ideal plan, but as de Tocqueville so aptly stated, “In a revolution, as in a novel, the most difficult part to invent is the end.”

PURE Yoga Hong Kong was offering Baron Baptiste’s ‘40-Day Personal Revolution Programme’ taught by a lovely former snowboarder turned yogi from British Columbia.  From the brochure I picked up, the program seemed the perfect combination of structure and flexibility.  I rationalized that the six, two-and-a-half-hour Saturday afternoon sessions would nestle in between morning kid activities and evening social obligations without too much family disruption.  From a cursory look at the textbook, the rest of the program was pretty flexible, encouraging daily yoga and meditation in increasing durations and a generally healthy but un-prescribed whole foods diet.  No problem-o.  I got this revolution thing in the bag.

But why launch a revolution at the busiest time of the school year when I was gearing up to leave town for two months with three kids in tow?  Well, because I have a disability that it’s high time I address.  I’m metaphysically challenged.  I’m like the black sheep of the new age world.  Not that I really know anything about it, but when I talk with people who do, I get the sense that I have a rather disagreeable metaphysical composition.  I’m a Virgo, numerology 8, and a 9 on the Enneagram.  Put those all together and you get an organized peacemaker with visions of grandeur.  Time to get to the bottom of this personal narrative, and what better than a disciplined program of physical and mental growth to cap off another season in Hong Kong?

Ironically, I missed the first Saturday class on “Presence” because I was having my energy rebalanced at a swanky wellness retreat with my husband in Hua Hin, Thailand.  I know, so cliché, but the trip had been planned for a while, and as I said, I was fitting revolution in AROUND my regular life. I read the first hundred pages of the book, donned my new citrine bracelet to balance my solar plexus chakra and headed back to Hong Kong for week one of my revolution.  Our marching orders were simply to “be” where we are.  The twelve “Laws of Transformation” prescribed by Baptiste provided the framework for excavating our best essential selves.  I was on my way to revolution.

I rocked the first week.  Five minutes of mediation twice a day?  Check.  Twenty minutes of yoga daily?  I did more.  Mindful eating?  I mulled over every morsel.  Revolution?  No problem.

When I finally joined my fellow revolutionaries at the start of week two, “Vitality,” I was surprised to walk into the room and see sixty unfamiliar faces.  Sounds strange, but despite the high density living, the chain yoga set is an insular little group in Hong Kong and can feel downright provincial at times.  Never one to miss an opportunity to meet someone with a good story, I was pleasantly surprised with the potential that surrounded me.  My fellow revolutionaries were similarly bursting with self-awareness and healthy habits on their own personal voyages.  As I sat listening to each and every one of them share the details of their week, I had my first lesson in patience and presence, but I was actually surprised by how charming it was. We made an agreement that information shared in the studio would stay there, so I will respect that and not tell any stories unrelated to my own experience, but suffice it to say that in competitive Hong Kong, the athletic yoga component was generally easier for folks than the quiet meditation.

The class assistant passed out a nifty matrix each week on which we were encouraged to record our mediation minutes, every morsel we consumed and our yoga practice.  Being goal oriented, I found this sheet to be entirely motivating and was often the sole reason I would sit in meditation some evenings instead of diving straight into bed.  It worked, but as days passed I began to feel that I was missing the point.

The jump from five to ten minutes of mediation that week was huge.  I can do just about anything for five minutes.  A few long deep breaths and some exercises to notice thoughts without reacting to them, and the timer sounded before I knew it.  But ten minutes requires an actual practice and discipline that I just didn’t have in my conscious bag of tricks. Despite my mother being a meditation teacher, I’ve never been able to do it well.  As soon as I sat that week, I was transfixed by the image of each thought as an enormous fish caught on the line as it thrashed itself to submission in its attempt at liberation. “Get off.  Seriously, go!  Get off, get off, get OFF!”  I would implore my fishy thoughts to leave, but the more I battled, the more they stayed on the line.  Ten minutes of this battling felt interminable, but would eventually pass and I’d finish feeling more relieved to be back on shore than enlightened.

I’ve been practicing yoga for fifteen years and, after living in Santa Monica for more than a decade, healthy eating has become so ingrained that neither of these elements of the program presented a big challenge. Getting to Central for the daily yoga class was the only tricky part, but on days that I didn’t make it to class I found the YogaGlow website to be useful.  There I could take classes from global favorites like Amy Ipoliti in the comfort of my own room and for the duration I had available.  Gotta love the Internet!

Rounding the corner into week three, “Equanimity,” I was hitting my stride and feeling really great. We learned some new meditation techniques to try at home, and talked about Baptiste’s principles for stepping to the edge.  Sitting knee to knee with the person sitting next to us in the room, we had to share about our week.  We were asked to pay particular attention to our intuition this week and to let it guide our actions.  Bingo, that solar plexus chakra thing was all about listening to intuition, so this would be the week it all came together for me.  Right?  Sure.

The meditation increased to fifteen minutes in week three and I was surprised that something clicked and I was getting it.  I actually had a few of those buzzy moments where the top of my head was electrified without a specific thought in mind.  Could it be that I just fell asleep momentarily or was I really meditating?  I was never able to discern the difference between the two, but I got a feeling that’s what it feels like when you do it right.

My oldest son was initially surprisingly uncomfortable with the idea of me meditating, and even walked in on me one time with the same shocked expression as if I were doing that other thing kids walk in on in the bedroom.  But modeling positive behavior is a parenting fundamental, so I did it anyway and was rewarded with two sweet moments that week.

My five year old, who has an uncanny psychic connection to my biorhythms, opens his eyes in the morning at precisely the same time I do each day (5:25).  There’s no getting up before him to meditate.  If I’m up, so is he.  So one morning I asked if he would join me instead of just wandering about.  He sat right down, criss-cross-applesauce, placed his thumb and pointer finger together, turned them to the sky, and, gently resting them on his knees, closed his eyes.  We made it for 3 delicious minutes and it was a great meditation.  Later that week I told my 12 year old that I was going to my room to mediate and he actually didn’t roll his eyes.  Ten or so minutes into my mediation I heard footsteps and something being slid under the door.  I was torn.  Should I get up and see what it was, or continue for another five minutes first?  Well, I tried to stick it out, but curiosity won out and I got up to find a slip of paper from my nine-year-old little girl that said, “Mom please read to me when your done meditating – “Sidewalk.””  Needless to say, I went right in to read and returned to finish the mediation after she fell asleep.

But as far as “equanimity” went, I was a failure.  Wow, there’s something about where you place your attention that can expose a bigger problem and make it worse!  Focusing on equanimity made me angrier and more reactive to the mundane injustice of it all.  Easy to say, “Don’t sweat the small stuff,” but being a successful wife and mother of three kids in hectic Hong Kong is precisely about the extent to which the small stuff gets done right.

I paid particular attention to sugar consumption this week and realized that I really don’t eat much.  What I do consume is often the result of a gift or gesture.  I ate a cinnamon roll that a friend had carefully selected just for the occasion of our lovely breakfast, and I enjoyed it because I enjoy her and the fact that she invited me over to her home.  Baptiste calls these wholesome foods and acknowledges the role they play in our lives.  I like that about his philosophy and believe it whole-heartedly.

Which is why I approached week four, “Restoration” with not a little trepidation.  The one red flag in an otherwise solid program was a random three-day fruit cleanse that was neither medically substantiated nor even well laid out in the book.  Basically we were told to pick any three days within the week and eat only fruit.  We were reminded that avocados and tomatoes count and encouraged to be good to ourselves this week, but still show up for yoga.

 Having worked for a nutrition company in an office full of nutrition scientists for a few years, I have strong feelings about detox/clense diets and I generally don’t believe in them.  Still, I didn’t want to be the party pooper of the revolution, so I decided to embrace a modified version by cutting out wheat, dairy, meat, and alcohol from my diet for the three days.  I ate primarily raw vegetables, fruit and the occasional Ryvita cracker, but found my stomach was in knots and I didn’t really feel very well.  I felt even worse when I spoke with a fellow revolutionary in the locker room who claimed to have subsisted on coconut water alone for all three days.  That class meeting our facilitator asked us to think about intuition and how we’d used our intuition that week.   I wanted to scream that my intuition told me that eating only fruit for three days was a stupid thing to do, but I kept my mouth shut and privately reasoned that at this point I’ve pretty much figured out what my body needs to be fed and I shouldn’t mess with it.

Still, I had a really powerful week.  A month into daily yoga practice and I was really strong.  The point on my lower back that is always a little tweaked stopped bothering me and I was able to stand up from wheel pose.  I held my handstands longer and joyfully popped in and out of headstand and crow with little effort.  A classmate who runs a juice detox company gave me a green drink sample that included spirulina and I felt like I had consumed a double espresso all day.  I think I’ve discovered the wonder food for me, and it’s algae, not caffeine.

But things went downhill from there.  By week five, “Centering,” my revolution was in tatters.  We were supposed to be meditating 25 minutes twice a day, introducing minerals into our diets and practicing daily yoga for an hour.  I had a date with my husband, a fiftieth birthday party and a farewell for dear friends, which meant three nights of indulgence instead of piety.  How was I supposed to have a revolution with such a busy social schedule?

That week I tried to go to yoga, but I’d maxed out my class allotment for the month, so I would have to pay extra.  Since I was already there that day, I reluctantly paid for the only class available at that time.  Hot yoga.  In June.  In Hong Kong.  The smell when I walked in the 105-degree room was nauseating.  Even before the first asana, sweat poured from the men like a summer storm.  The foul common mat beneath my feet stunk, and my feet slid every time I tried for down dog.  Compounding the humiliation, I found after my shower that I had forgotten to take a bra and underwear and ended up in a taxi in my little sundress with about an inch of fabric to spare between my root chakra and the gross plastic taxi seat.

My meditation was equally cursed.  I never watch TV, but on the rare occasion that my husband goes on a business trip, I catch up on Glee.  I know, strange choice, but having grown up in a family of high school music teachers, Glee is my own personal history re-write, where being in show choir is the hottest game in town.  Anyway, in the national competition, the Glee cast sings Meatloaf’s “Paradise by the Dashboard Light.”  Never in the history of music has a tune so insidiously worked it’s way into a brain to the point that even my subconscious can’t keep it at bay in a fraught filled meditation. “So now I’m praying for the end of time, so hurry up man arrive!” relentlessly repeated, over and over as visions of Greek Week at college came flooding in along with it.  I had to quit the meditation or go mad, and the harder I tried to expel it, the tighter it’s grip.  I gave up.

By Thursday I had eaten everything bad in sight and I was about to write off my revolution completely.  That morning I had an hour to spare before my youngest’s pre-school concert and I could have switched on YogaGlow and checked that box on my revolution matrix.  Instead, I instinctively grabbed my running shoes and headed out the door to do the one thing that always works to settle my mind and increase my confidence.  I went for a run.  On my regular loop along the South China Sea, I listened to my Telluride Bluegrass play list and I felt clarity seeping into my pores with the breath. As Mumford and Son’s inspirational “Awake My Soul” rang in my ears, I finally saw the way to do the two things I had pledged to accomplish at the start of the 40 days.  I crystallized my vision for expanding my women’s hiking group and, if you are reading this and you aren’t related to me, I achieved my second goal too.

I arrived at week 6, “Celebrating,” and shared my story.  I found connection, empathy and support from those familiar faces who were now friends.  One of our mediations was to sit knee to knee with the person next to us and to stare into his or her eyes without looking away for four minutes.  There was uncomfortable laughter in the room, but not from me.  My partner was nervous, but I held her there in the space and she settled into it.  We connected and I felt good.  My yoga practice was strong too.  I left that final class feeling confident and centered, went home to kiss my kids, shower and head out to a friend’s house for a BBQ where we ate meat, sugar, carbohydrates, dairy and wine until the wee hours of the morning.  What’s a revolution without a dissenter?

So, on the final morning of my revolution, I didn’t meditate, but I did make it to yoga and, as I finish off a homemade coconut chocolate chip cookie, I can picture the revolutionaries shaking their heads at my lack of discipline and self-control.   Was my revolution a success or a failure?  Depends on how you look at it.  I suppose the thing about revolutions is that you just can’t plan how they’ll turn out.  Most real revolutions aren’t planned, they are sparked, and that’s just what happened to me on that run.  Whether or not the program precipitated that spark I’ll never know, but I suspect it did.   As Che Guevara said, “The Revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe.  You have to make it fall.”  I prefer to pick apples rather than aggressively agitating to make them fall, but the sentiment is there, and as I fix my gaze and raise my arms to the sky in tree pose, my foundation feels a lot steadier now.

The Right Kind of Like

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I wrote this a few years ago, sent it to some friends, but mostly it sat on my computer.  Recently, at a gathering of graduate school friends, I told this story and a woman who works with military wives told me that she was going to take my suggestion and use it.  I decided that if it was useful for her, maybe others would find it useful too.  Let me know what you think:

One afternoon I was invited to lunch at a friend’s house.  She is married to a rather high profile and somewhat intimidating man I had never met.  Her warning that I should not be offended, as he probably wouldn’t say much to me didn’t do anything to alleviate my discomfort at the thought of making small talk with him over lunch.  So I was surprised when he sat down at the table in his backyard, turned to me and asked,

“So, what do you LIKE to do?”

With the addition of that one simple word, “LIKE” — a word I’m usually trying to erase from my family’s California born and bred vocabulary — he so chivalrously lay down his cloak, welcoming me to step daintily across that first impression hurdle.  With that one word the possibilities were opened and her husband got a real answer.

“Well,” I gulped.  I decided to go for it.

“I like to take my children on cultural adventures near our adopted home in Hong Kong.  I like to cook and have friends over to enjoy healthy meals with me.  I like to run, hike, paddle board and do yoga.  I like to write, but I’m not as good at it as I’d like.  I like to organize events, watch TED Talks, drive in Hong Kong, and read about neuroplasticity, compassion and mindfulness.”

“What kind of yoga do you do?  Because your arms are very fit,” he replied.  I liked that question too.

With that one word, he spared me that awful other question that stay-at-home moms have not yet figured out how to answer with the force and authority we used to be able to muster when we “really worked.” Had he asked me, “What do you do?” my answer would have been an apologetic jumble of volunteer parent advisory groups, ad hoc writing gigs, glorified travel agent and bus driver for my family, that trailed off with, “You, know, that kind of stuff.” Just think for a moment how much better his question is, and what a difference it could make if we all added “LIKE” to our vocabulary in the right places.

And, it was a good thing he had built up some good will with that question, because I had a bit more trouble answering his next one.

“Are all bankers assholes?” he asked.

“Well,” I gulped.