Fighting to BE in the Moment

swimming pool (Photo credit: freefotouk)

So my new (two years now!) apartment has a swimming pool. And the weather is finally warm enough for me to get into it on a regular basis.

So why can't I just swim and enjoy it?

I find I am having a lot of trouble, these days, to keep the pool simply as an activity of fun and/or relaxation, rather than turning it into a chore.

Swimming is good exercise, we all know that, and I need to get in more exercise. So I am swimming laps, and I enjoy swimming laps, but I am trying not to let that become a chore. To have it become, "You must swim XX many laps."

I am trying to enjoy the texture and temperature of the cool water as my arms and legs move (ungracefully, but nobody's watching) through the water, the feel of it flowing through and around my fingers and toes, the faint smell of chlorine, the the shimmer of the water, the warmth of the sun on my face and back.

And that's another thing. The pool isn't heated, and like many apartments in SoCal, it's in an unnatural canyon. Between the shadow of the buildings on the east, and the ones on the west, the pool only gets direct sunlight for perhaps 5-6 hours each day, even in July, and the temps can drop as much as 30 degrees at night. So the water temperature tends to stay cool, even on days when the temperature reaches the 80's or 90's.

This means, since I am not a fan of the cold, I like to lie out long enough to get heated up, before getting into the water.  (Yes, I always use sunscreen. No, not always all over - later on I generally find a spot or three that I managed to miss.)

I lie out, get warm, or hot even, get in the pool and swim some laps till I am tired and/or cold, then repeat.

Can I simply lie in the sun, enjoy the rays sinking into my body with their vitamin D, slowly turning my skin from its natural corpselike white color to a faintly tan color?

No, I feel I have to do something, even when I am lying out. The other day I took pages with me for a speech I am rehearsing. Generally I take a book. Because otherwise how can I justify slicing out 1 1/2 to 3 hours, in the middle of a perfectly good day, when I could be writing/organizing/houseworking or Doing Something Productive?

Yeah, do ya think maybe I should learn something from these posts on workaholics? Yes, I have many Important Events coming up, that demand research and preparation.

And yet, it is still okay to set aside time for pure relaxation. Not just okay, but necessary. To kick back and tell that monkey mind just to hush.

I'm going to try to get in the pool a few evenings a week, plus at least one day this coming weekend,  when I will just BE poolside, and in the water.  Just to enjoy the water, and the sun, and the palm trees rustling in the wind.

I may take a book, if I am reading one that I enjoy, or I may not.

What do you do to beat back the "productive" vibe?

Your thoughts?

A-Z: Yoga Strengthens Body & Soul

I admit it, people were all "You should try yoga, you should try yoga" for years, and I didn't want to, simply because I felt pushed towards it. And partly because it seemed kind of wussy and weird.

Then I hurt my back, and my physical therapists strongly recommended yoga. And I was hurting so much I thought, what the hey. I have nothing to lose.

While any regular exercise is good for a body, yoga is "do-able" even for most people with health conditions, whereas running or weight training may not be. 
 
I started with a DVD like this one (actually, I started with a video tape, and got DVD's later). DVD's work for me because I can do them at home, before work/shower, and not squander the time driving to/from a gym. Plus, there's the money issue - one flat amount, and you don't keep paying.

 For someone else, going out to a class might be the best solution.It's also a good idea consult your doctor to make sure yoga is safe for you (thought it's safe for almost everyone).

Later, I added more DVD's to my repertoire, so as not to get bored.

Once I got into a routine of daily yoga, I found that I felt more flexible, stronger, and better about life in general. When things were rough between me and my ex, and I skipped my morning yoga, I didn't feel nearly as capable of handling the stress.

All in my head? Maybe, and maybe not.

From the Mayo Clinic:
The potential health benefits of yoga are numerous and may include:

• Stress reduction. With its quiet, precise movements, yoga draws your focus away from your busy, chaotic day and toward calm as you move your body through poses that require balance and concentration.
• Increased fitness. As you learn and refine new poses, you may enjoy improved balance, flexibility, range of motion and strength. And this means you're less likely to injure yourself in other physical endeavors or in your daily activities.
• Management of chronic health conditions. Yoga might help with a variety of health conditions, such as cancer, depression, pain, anxiety and insomnia, by helping with sleep problems, fatigue and mood. Yoga also can help reduce heart rate and blood pressure.
• Weight loss. If you're overweight or have binge-eating disorder, yoga may help you make the healthy lifestyle changes necessary to gain control of your eating and drop those extra pounds.

 from Healthplus24:

Mental Health Benefits

A few benefits of yoga on mental health are:

• improvements in concentration, memory, attention,
• learning efficiency,
• mood,
• depth perception,
• increases in well-being,
• self-confidence,
• social skills,
• decrease/elimination in depression, anxiety, hostility, etc.

Yoga is helpful in reducing stress

Emotional distress is an increasing public health problem and yoga has been claimed to induce stress reduction and empowerment in practicing subjects. Yoga therapy has been shown to be associated with improved mood, and is possibly a useful way of reducing stress in patients admitted for psychiatric treatment.¹¹Michalsen et al. showed in a study that women suffering from mental distress participating in a 3-month Iyengar yoga class show significant improvements on measures of stress, anxiety, well-being, vigor, fatigue and depression. Physical well-being is also increased, and those subjects suffering from headache or back pain reported marked pain relief.¹²

Yoga shown beneficial in psychotic treatment

Yoga practice has also been shown to improve different aspects of sleep in the elderly population.¹³Treatment of schizophrenia has remained unsatisfactory despite the availability of antipsychotics. A study by Duraiswamy et al. examined the efficacy of yoga therapy as an add-on treatment to the ongoing antipsychotic treatment. Patients were randomly assigned to either yoga therapy or physical therapy. Subjects in the yoga therapy group had significantly less psychopathology than those in the physical therapy group at the end of 4 months. They also had significantly greater social and occupational functioning and quality of life. Both nonpharmacological interventions contributed to reduction in symptoms with yoga therapy having better efficacy.¹⁴

I know yoga worked for me, and I went from being a skeptic to being a fan. If you haven't tried it, why wouldn't you see if it might be something good for you? Don't worry about doing the more extreme poses (I don't do 'em), just give it a few weeks and see if you like it. You have nothing to lose but your pain and stress.

My A-Z theme is Issues related to Mental Health or Mental Illness.

Are you a yoga fan, or have you never tried it?

If you've never tried it, what holds you back?

If you practice yoga, what do you like about it?

How the Buddha Girl Got Cracked

As I was decorating my new apartment last year, I saw a photo of this small Buddha woman/girl in one of my many catalogs and fell in love with her. (FYI, I was once the catalog queen of the West Coast, though I have cut down substantially) She radiated peace, tranquility, compassion. I decided I must have her, that she would help me keep focused on being Zen, letting go, breathing.

Eventually, as things settled down, I decided she belonged in my bathroom. Bought a couple of white floating shelves - but she didn't look good on a white shelf. Bought a dark shelf, and gave the white ones to a friend.

She looked awesome.

But... she's fairly substantial, weighing about four pounds. And I live in SoCal. Earthquake country.

So of course, the next project was finding museum wax to secure her on the shelf, in case of earthquake, so she wouldn't come flying off the shelf and brain me in the head as I was seated on my white porcelain meditating spot. Should said earthquake occur while I was *ahem* Taking Care of Business.

Done. Now, here's where the fleas come in. *scratching*   I could have put a single daub of museum wax on the bottom center, and she would probably have been just fine. But, being accustomed to OCPD-think, I decided to place three daubs of museum wax under her, one at each corner, and really press her down on the shelf, hard. Better overdoing than doing just enough, right?

Photo via mksystem at Flickr
Fleas, or just a good healthy scratch?

Buddha Girl was fine for one night, then she cracked.

At first I was really distraught.  Thought about throwing her away, and getting a new, uncracked one.  or perhaps using wood stain (or my cheap and easy go-to, colored markers) to minimize the appearance of said crack.

Then I realized, Buddha Girl is even better now.  She's my reminder that overdoing doesn't always work out for the best.  A reminder to check for fleas.  A reminder that sometimes flawed and cracked is better than perfect.

Now I look at her (several times a day, depending on my water consumption) and smile.

She's cracked and flawed.  I'm cracked and flawed.

And we're both perfect, just the way we are.

Do you have a talisman, picture, or some reminder 
that being flawed is perfectly okay?

Your thoughts?

It's Just A Flesh Wound (Or Is It?)

One of the things that happened to me, after I found out about OCPD, is I was filled with an overwhelming feeling of love and compassion for my poor, unaware OCPD boyfriend.

He couldn't help himself.  He had a disorder.

Therefore, I "shouldn't" feel hurt when he said something or did something cruel or controlling.  Just get on with business, like this guy.

Except that telling ourselves it doesn't hurt, pretending "it's just a flesh wound" doesn't actually help make it feel better.  When somebody cuts off one of our arms, it's gonna bleed.

We need to recognize that living with somebody who calls us names, takes over our space via hoarding or going through our pockets, tries to micromanage everything right down to where and how we eliminate our bowels (see Crazy Rules for how some with OCPD have attempted to control this down to bathrooms used and toilet paper consumption)... it's not going to leave us unscathed.

When we tell ourselves, "I know s/he has a disorder, I shouldn't feel bad," it's like we're kicking ourselves when we're down.  First we feel badly because a train in the form of our disordered loved one has just run us over.  Likely, unintentionally, and if they are aware and actively battling their OCPD, they may even feel sorry about it, but we have just been run over by a train. It is crazythink on our part to say, "it's just a flesh wound" and to pile guilt on ourselves because it hurts.

It's okay to feel the pain.  It's okay to let the disordered person in your life know that s/he has hurt you, just like you'd yell, "Ow!" in the theater if some clumsy person tramped on your toes.  It's okay to take a break - go for a walk, see a movie, spend the night in a hotel, or even take a longer separation, if the pain is too intense to cope for a little while.  

It is more than okay, it is vital to take good physical and emotional care of ourselves (whether we're in an OCPD relationship or not.)  See a good therapist who can help nudge us back on track when we are becoming unbalanced and crawling with fleas.

Even now, over a year since I moved out, many months since I ended the romantic relationship that continued afterwards, I am still only beginning to understand how deeply damaging it was to my spirit to live with Debbie Downer.  (It's funny as a SNL skit, horrible to live with.)  I have my life and my joy back, and yes, I have pain, too, as I allow myself to feel all the things I stuffed down inside.

I'm not suggesting - if you live with such a person - that you leave.  Only you can decide if you should leave, or stay, and if you do decide to leave, when the right time would be.

But you need to take care of you.  Be as kind and loving and patient to yourself as you would be to a friend going through what you are.  Don't beat up on yourself for not feeling "the right way."

Let yourself be in the moment.  Feel what you need to feel, without trying to talk yourself out of it, smother it, swallow it down with food (unless it's Haagen Daz, that doesn't count), or otherwise rush the uncomfortable or painful emotion out of the room.  Let it pull up a chair and stay for a while, let yourself learn the lesson it is there to share with you.

Do you have an experience of letting yourself be with emotional pain?

Please share any tips, below.

The Progress of Boundary Betty

I hope it means progress when you can read something, laugh, and hang your head sheepishly and think, OMG, I could have written this!

From Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert 

Moreover, I have boundary issues with men.  Or maybe that's not fair to say.  To have issues with boundaries, one must have boundaries in the first place, right?  But I disappear into the person I love.  I am the permeable membrane.  If I love you, you can have everything.  You can have my time, my devotion, my ass, my money, my family, my dog, my dog's money, my dog's time - everything.  If I love you, I will carry for you all your pain, I will assume for you all your debts (in every definition of the word), I will protect you from your own insecurity, I will project upon you all sorts of good qualities that you have never actually cultivated in yourself and I will buy Christmas presents for your entire family.  I will give you the sun and the rain, and if they are not available, I will give you a sun check and a rain check.  I will give you all this and more, until I get so exhausted and depleted that the only way I can recover my energy is by becoming infatuated with someone else.

She wrote this as an explanation as to why she chose to be celibate in Italy, of all places.  Where rampant sensuality vibrates off every fountain and marble edifice - and you can't turn around in Italy without bumping your nose (or other body part) on an edifice of some sort.

from Flickr Creative Commons
by xinem

Still, it makes perfect sense to me, as I have also embarked on a year of none.  Or nun, however you want to look at it.

Because I know for a fact, I'm too f#&ked up to even think about another relationship right now.  I'm working on my boundaries, and in some places they're pretty good, and in others they're better than they used to be, and in others... well, if they were a stone wall, a dachshund with a limp could hop over without scraping his belly.

Every self-help book and site and guru says: You need to learn to love yourself.

I get it.  In theory.  In practice... well... I'm taking baby steps.

I'm learning about intuitive eating, and not punishing myself with diets anymore.

I'm working on understanding my own "permeable membrane" issues when it comes to men, and "normal" boundary issues when it comes to family, friends, and co-workers.  Realizing I don't have to figuratively throw myself on the train tracks every time, in order for people to like me.

I can set limits for what I am and am not willing to do for someone, and that doesn't make me a bad person.  


Photo from Wikimedia Commons



Of course, to set limits, that means I have to explore what my own thoughts and feelings are.  This means a fair amount of solitude and reading and meditation, which is just not real do-able when one is involved with a new lover (or even an old one.)

I'm trying to be kind and patient with myself.  That means goals, but not harsh ones.  I'm doing things I enjoy, but also do stuff I have to, like household cleaning.  Because I truly can't take as much delight in my wonderful own apartment with all my favorite things around me, if I am up to my ankles in cat hair.  (Mind you, the things I have left out of place, the dirty dishes I have occasionally left in the sink, would curl OCPD ex-bf's hair.  He-he-he.)



Speaking of OCPD, I did create a list for self-help (do I need Frontline for my fleas?):

1. Figure out there's a problem.
2. Research how to deal with it.
3. Implement a solution - and if one doesn't work, tweak it or try something else, or a combination of things.  (Hey, if a combo plate works in a Mexican restaurant, why not in my head?)  
4. Practice the solution over and over until it becomes habit.

The one thing that throws me is, seems like there is so much to work on.  And I can't just do 1-2 things, compartmentalized and completed separately, before moving on to the next "thing."  I need to integrate mindful eating and better boundaries and learning my limits and a whole bunch of other things, because I need to become a whole, integrated person.

Or at least, a person on her way to becoming a whole, integrated person.  Not thinking I will ever reach the finish line and be done, in this lifetime.

What goals are on your combo plate?

And how are your boundaries today, hmmm?

Leave a Comment or Reaction and let me know.