Indy!

Well, pretty flaccid and tired. I said to James, it was like after making Schlindler's List, how can you get that impassioned about another rehash of trashy early-century serial dramas? I hope the filmmakers and actors had fun with each other, because I came out feeling battered and without memories of anything...memorable.

Here's Fresh Air's spot-on take on the movie, here.

More thoughts

At the end of the MBCT group this morning, someone asked what my experience was, and since she was a doctor and the other student was a yoga instructor, we had something in common to talk about. We addressed that guilt suffered by teachers and therapists that they are not as perfect as their teachings, but agreed that people get into these roles partially to serve, and largely to learn.

I'm constantly astounded at the wise things I say to clients that I don't apply to my own life. Or at just what they are teaching me if I can listen. For instance, the yoga teacher talked about managing her mood by asanas that opened up the chest, and as I got lost in the back streets trying to find a way through the Bay to Breakers street closures, I realized, hey, that might work for me too! And sure enough, just pulling back my shoulders started shifting my mood towards something lighter and more open.

It's funny how our basic needs can elude us. What I often come back to is my need--I should stress that, my need, is to feel that I'm serving and that I'm productive. Whether under that is a need to feel connected, that's probably there with service and productivity being the vehicles for that relationship. I don't feel fully alive without that, and I certainly don't function very well without them. Whether it's because of something everyone needs, or just my idiosyncratic needs, I feel like the best way of relating to this is in a real functional mode: without these relations in my life, I don't function, so I do them in the same way I eat my greens. Maybe something sacred should be there too, but it seems most important to me to orient myself in these ways is just necessary, period.

For me--I'm seeing this today at work, which on the weekend can often feel like a little island floating in the middle of an ocean--I'm really seeing how I need to feel in motion in order not to start a depressive reaction. But the trick here is not to fall into the compulsive thrashing in order to feel energy, but to look for the motion that is already in my experience. And it's there, even in the gray-sky days of my life. But it requires faith and look/feeling carefully into what's in front of me. It means taking a deep breath and observing, and not allowing myself to panic. It also means holding a vision/belief/image of motion to counter the inner vision/belief/image of stagnation that can be triggered.

That last bit is a fascinating piece for me, how important the use of imagery is in managing mood. Maybe in the ultimate sense it's unnecessary, when you're grounded in mindfulness to the degree that you are never seeing life from thought, but only from experience. Till then, though, images are a huge determinant in our lives, whether you're aware of them or not. And so telling yourself a good story, with enough evidence not to make it a delusion, is really really important. It is the undergirding that supports you when you lose your direct exposure to reality. Stories are not true, but they are very very useful at times. They can be traps, but they can also be very good friends, when they are resonant with reality. Saying, "All things are impermanent" is not the reality or experience of impermanence, but it is a languaged expression of something that is true, which makes it a very good story.

And again, until the story function of our brain collapses, it's going to be telling a narrative, and it behooves us to have a good one.

Check in

I finished up with my first Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy for Depression group, which had been running 8 weeks on Sunday mornings. We started with five and two dropped out, and then today were just two as the third was on vacation. It was a stressful run, overall, though seemingly it went well and people got benefits from the class. I'll probably run it again but I need a breather for a while.

Ironically, the group brought 3 or 4 clients, and then several others came from elsewhere, but the sudden jump in numbers within 3 weeks, along with the nascent group, kind of floored me with energy output. My Tuesdays used to end about noon, but now I go from 9am to 10pm, with a break in the middle. Plus my half-way house job, it adds up to a lot of hours a week. The nice part is I'm making some change to put towards paying off bills, and the downside is I've less time to market and build up my practice to leave the half-way house job, or get one of the other projects up and running to allow that transition.

So I've been fairly tired recently, not so much on the physical front as what happens when I've got a few too many irons in the fire. My system starts flinching at new outputs of energy and there's a drag towards depression as a sort of systematic closing down. Which takes more energy to fight, or just more rest. Da da da.

So I'm trying to adjust to my recent success, and as a few clients attrition out (after solid and productive work), and the group ends, I'm actually taking a deep breath and looking towards the next marketing push, which will be offering free, hour-long workshops on an EMDR-related technique called "resource tapping."

And at HH, the work is about what it's always been, and I'm pretty ready to leave, but finances are such that until the income switches over to my practice and other projects, I'll need to stay just for body and soul. So I continue to try to make use of it, and it still has things to teach me.

For instance, today I noticed, driving through the maze that's created every Bay to Breakers day, each year (because they block off the streets leading from the Embarcadero to GG Park, and then through the park down to the ocean), that I was feeling a sinking, stagnating feeling heading down to work. When I checked in to see what I was lacking, it was a sense of continuity and "flow-through" to my experience down on the Peninsula. There's a sense of stasis down at the house that sets in, which I think was compensated for during school and internship by the inevitable flow towards either graduation or licensure. Now that I've "made it," the flow needs to be a more internal sense, and sometimes it just fails me. That's when I have to be careful not to drift down into a depression.

I think there are associations that arise to hot, seemingly empty and endless summer days in Sacramento. School was out, and I'd often be at home along, drifting. So these hot suburban days seem to conjure that same feeling, and it's difficult sometimes to be in the present and realize that all those days are long gone. Truly, some days I long to be on the proverbial pig farm.

What helps, and what's helping today, is to remember why I'm here and why I'm doing the therapeutic work I'm doing in general: which is, to serve growth, in people, in this culture, in spirit. I was telling Heather over the weekend that what I notice myself losing my cool about most often is exposure to people or opinions which seem to be stultifying. Not just coasting, or fixed, but actually anti-growth. That's where I lose it and start into fighting mode, probably because I feel the sense of being threatened by being caged, or worse, trussed up like a bonsai tree, i.e., intentionally stunted. The sense of nausea that arises from that is so palpable, and so motivating to fight back.

But the probably here is the fighting part. I love that Zen story about the bull in the village. Basically, a bull gets loose in a village and is blocking the main road, keeping villagers from moving through. They are very upset, but don't know what to do as the bull isn't calming down. So they see the Master walking down the hill from his hermitage and think, oh good, he'll know what to do. As he gets close, he looks up from his mediation and sees the bull, sees the upset and expectant villagers, sees the bottleneck in the road...and walks down another road.

That's where I'd like to go, to not get so freaked by the sense of stagnation that I actually get into a death lock with the experience. All I need to do is acknowledge it and then walk another direction. I'm only in danger if I grab it.