Often, clients who come to me want to feel less overwhelmed, to stop getting mired in the frustrations of their day-to-day, and to find out how to get out of cycles of rumination more quickly — so their days can be creative, productive, energizing, and spacious.
If you share those desires, this little story of utter mundanity from my life, written this past Thursday, is for you.
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I woke up this morning in a Hilton in Los Angeles. I was particularly aware of my head throbbing – a throbbing head is the key fixture of my chronic pain – and of a little smile on my face.
After a full few weeks and a few recent days of work travel, I allowed myself to give over to exhaustion yesterday and 1. order from Uber Eats (which definitely doesn’t exist in my 1200-person mountain town), 2. watch the highlights of three of my fav movies in bed for hours (which is not a thing at home, typically, because I have a spunky four-year-old), and 3. go to sleep fabulously early.
So behind this morning’s smile was a feeling of anticipation for all the productivity that this morning would bring, given my awesome night’s sleep and having given into the desire for lazing-about yesterday.
As I considered what to do first – a walk, 15min of meditation, breakfast in the restaurant downstairs, writing this column for you, prepping for clients, emails, calling my mother – I opened my computer and thought, I’ll just get one little random thing done: a question of one of our world’s many customer service centers re a small accounting issue.
Should take five minutes, right?
An hour later, it was sorted. And my smile was gone. And my excited anticipation felt squashed. And my brain felt like a tight knot being crushed even tighter in a small room where all six sides are closing in (cue the trash compactor scene from Star Wars.)
I was pissed.
The glorious openness at waking felt utterly gone, filled instead with all kinds of rumination about how the morning was supposed to go, and sadness for humanity that companies make things so very hard sometimes, just to make a buck.
Hunger overtook me, and I brought myself, my frustration, and my swirling, painful brain down to the hotel restaurant. As I walked, I practiced what I preach: I allowed myself to feel my angry feelings, rather than pushing them away. And I gave myself some validation and reassurance, telling myself, “This is how you’re feeling right now, Kathleen. This isn’t forever, it’s just what you’re feeling right now. Go ahead and feel it.”
I sat down at a table, opened the Pema Chödrön book I brought with me, and started reading.
And nearly instantaneously, with these words, the compacting room around my brain opened up and the knot loosened:
Training our mind to recognize open awareness is a long-term exploration of working with our deeply ingrained habits. We’re so used to being caught up in our struggle against life as it is… We’re all good at finding ways of tying ourselves in knots. But if we continue to be curious… We come to know who we really are behind the kaleidoscope of perceptions and thoughts that make up our experience.
Why did that paragraph miraculously help, and so quickly?
When we ruminate, it’s like our brains are caught in a loop. And we’ll keep looping on the same annoyance or problem over and over again, our brains searching for an answer. The issue is, with the current information at hand, there is no good answer, and the loop continues. When I opened up the book and read, I gave my brain a little something more to work with — a new bit of information, the words of a trusted source — that it could use to break the loop.
I was reminded of how I want to exist on the planet: rather than struggling against life as it is, tying myself into knots by wishing things had gone the way I expected, I want to work with reality — with life as it is. I want to be aware of my thoughts and my perceptions of life, and to get curious about them, rather than taking them as gospel.
Pema’s words were like a little key opening up a door in my brain, light and air flooding in.
I put down the book for a moment and allowed myself to bring my awareness to my present moment. The morning had not gone as I wanted thus far: reality. Necessity to suffer because of it? Optional. My reality now: I was ordering a tasty breakfast in a lovely room, and there were plenty of hours in the day remaining, and my head was throbbing as it always is, and what a lucky duck I was to have a fun few days ahead of me while my son was being well-taken care of elsewhere.
After that, the restaurant felt brighter, and I noticed glorious humanity around me. A man brought his little baby in his stroller to the breakfast buffet, and I smiled as I remembered when I did things like that just a few years go – when doing something as simple as making a plate of food, you must bring your kiddo with you.
And then I went for a little walk, and at one point I intersected with 30 dogs on leashes attached to the waist belts of three dog walkers. As they passed and one doodle lunged toward me, excited, the dog walker said, “Waffle, hey!” with an admonishing tone. And I smiled again, finding it truly hilarious to hear the word “waffle” be said with an admonishing tone.
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Feeling my feelings and then Pema Chödrön’s words were the little keys that helped me unlock my frustrated, swirling brain and return to myself in the present moment. What are the little keys that help you unlock yours and let the light in, when you’re ruminating or stuck in your own internal stories?
Write back and let me know.
Yours in acceptance of present reality,
Kathleen
p.s. If you missed last week’s post, “What is mental well-being to you?”, read it here. And if you’d like to read more about the foundation of this coaching column — what is an eyes-open entrepreneur? — read the About page here.