Learning from the Slips

Those of you on the Complaint-free journey know that every slip up reveals something, peels back a new layer of learning. So far every slip has revealed to me some way in which I could be taking better care of myself. The very morning after my last Day One, I didn’t even make it to 8:30 a.m. BUT, I stopped and analyzed exactly what went wrong and came to the amazing conclusion that what I eat or if I eat a snack before bed impacts how I feel on waking.

With the idea that diet can affect my morning mood, I am going to attempt no pre-sleep snacking at all and if I run into a night when a growly tummy is keeping me awake, I’ll use protein to quiet it, no carbs. I also need to come up with some way to slowly raise my blood sugar on waking. See, I don’t want to go into the kitchen when I’m still in my jammies with head looking like three cows and their sandpaper tongues have been working it over. Nobody else in this household enters the common area until they are bathed and dressed. So first I join Sylvain upstairs, shower and dress and THEN I have breakfast. When I live alone, I always eat first because I know I need to. What happens is that before I’ve eaten, I’m not human. I’m sometimes depressed and anxious and often irritable.

So perhaps I could keep some watered down juice at hand? Tiny boxes of raisins? Almonds?

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My day was made more joyful by watching the nuthatches at the peanut feeder, the sparrows and finches on the suet cage, the doves enjoying the cracked corn I’d sprinkled on the ground, squirrels and birds alike coming to the bird bath.

I get so much strength and sense of community from reading your blogs, you beautiful people who are back to swimming and remembering to breathe and learning to love your bodies and taking time for rest and massages. Without the sense of human connectedness you give me, I would be lost.

It’s Friday, which means a night on the town with my love. We are going to see No Country for Old Men just because I freaking adore the Coen brothers and Sylvain wasn’t opposed. Next time he gets to drag me to see I Am Legend because he really wants to see it and I know he wants me along as his movie date. So I will just have to start bracing myself now for the fact that the dog dies in the end, ’cause you totally know they are going to kill the dog in the end. I’ll bring a box of Kleenex and deal with it.

For those of you struggling with accepting your beautiful womanly form the way it is, I offer you this poem by Maya Angelou.

Phenomenal Woman

Pretty women wonder where my secret lies.
I’m not cute or built to suit a fashion model’s size
But when I start to tell them,
They think I’m telling lies.
I say,
It’s in the reach of my arms,
The span of my hips,
The stride of my step,
The curl of my lips.
I’m a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.

I walk into a room
Just as cool as you please,
And to a man,
The fellows stand or
Fall down on their knees.
Then they swarm around me,
A hive of honey bees.
I say,
It’s the fire in my eyes,
And the flash of my teeth,
the swing in my waist,
And the joy in my feet.
I’m a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.

Men themselves have wondered
what they see in me.
They try so much
But they can’t touch
My inner mystery.
When I try to show them,
They say they still can’t see.
I say,
It’s in the arch of my back,
The sun of my smile,
The ride of my breasts,
The grace of my style.
I’m a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.

Now you understand
just why my head’s not bowed.
I don’t shout or jump about
Or have to talk real loud.
When you see me passing,
It ought to make you proud.
I say,
It’s in the click of my heels,
The bend of my hair,
the palm of my hand,
the need for my care.
‘Cause I’m a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.
(from And Still I Rise, 1978)

Anatomy of a GWCC Crash

Today is day 29 of mindful breathing and Day One of no Gossipping, Whining, Complaining or Criticizing. Last night I was tripped up by an old complex. And what, you might ask, is a complex? I think of it as being similar to a knot in a muscle, only instead of being in muscle, it’s in the psyche. One of the goals of Jungian analysis is to locate the destructive complexes and work them out. Such work begins with the study of ones dreams.

Do you ever find yourself in a situation where you are getting way more worked up than the circumstances merit? Do you ever look back on a fight you had with someone or a time you blew up or broke down in tears and think, “what on earth came over me?” That is a sure fire way of discovering a complex. When you act in ways you really wouldn’t act if you were clear-headed, you might call that being complexed or, as I say, being in the grips of a complex.

Some complexes no longer have the power to send me into unconscious behaviour as they once did. Three and a half years of analysis helped me A LOT. Besides working through some of these gnarls in my psychic energy, I also learned to recognize when I am in a complexed state so that I can pause and postpone any major decisions until after the complex has released me.

Here is a made up example of a complex, just to give you an idea.

When Jane was a little girl, her father always made the family arrive everywhere early. Jane remembers spending a miserable eternity in waiting rooms with nothing to do. This pissed her off to no end. She hated it. HATED. Now, as an adult, she cannot bring herself to leave the house until the last possible moment. If she needs to leave at 1:00 and it’s 12:55, she will try to cram one more tiny chore into those five minutes. In fact, she often runs a tiny bit late for every date and outing with friends. She is not aware that her behaviour is tied to a bundle of feelings, memories and experiences to do with her father, authority, control and time.

Last night my GWCC stumble came about because I allowed a complex to be triggerd. I’m not sure if you’d call it my martyr complex or food complex. I’ll explain.

My little brother has a sense of entitlement. He has his own complex around food which I won’t go into, but the result was that as a child and young adult, whenever we were in a restaurant and someone else was paying (which was all the time), he would order the most expensive thing on the menu. He would order an appetizer and cocktail, the lobster thermadore, a dessert and a coffee. The rest of us would be taking a cue from the host’s order and would keep our order within the same price range as the one picking up the bill. Well, no, not all of us. There I was with my own compensating complex. I felt I had to offset my brother. So while he ordered, I winced and asked for a small side salad and water. Yeah, sick, I know.

My analyst and I were busy enough with my gimp complex, mother complex, sexualizing everything complex; we never got around to working on my dinner table denial complex.

So there I was last night as we passed around the serving plates of delicious dishes Ma had prepared. Most nights supper is made up of stuff I would not have dreamed seven months ago I would be living off of, but I am not strong enough to prepare my own separate meal night after night in the name of remaining health food nut and granola crunching vegetarian. I have managed to remain 90% gluten free, though sugar is creeping back in. All of this helps explain why none of my pants fit and I have taken to wearing my loose hippie dresses again…you know, the ones that make kind old ladies ask you when the baby is due.

Last night Ma had made her wonderful creamy cole slaw. I had taken my fair share and had left enough for the two people who had yet to take any. Sister M wasn’t home yet, as she often doesn’t get off work in time to start eating with the rest of us, so we always leave a decent portion of everything for her.

Leaving some cole slaw for others is not easy for me. You see, I want it all. It’s one thing with which I could pile my plate high and finish, then refill my plate and finish it all again. I might even be able to do that three times, forgoing the chicken and the rice altogether.

Much in the same way I used to kick my brother under the table when he’d go on an ordering frenzy, I often find myself reminding Sylvain to leave enough for his sister. But when he started piling all of the rest of the slaw on his plate, it wasn’t his sister I was thinking about. He was slurping up the cole slaw I wanted for myself but had left for M.

In that moment, it was as if every single time I had ever ordered less than I was hungry for or lied to my mother, saying I was okay when I was not okay in order to be the good, low-maintenance child…all those moments came crashing into my body. With every bite Sylvain put in his mouth, the more complexed I became. Sad, angry, hungry, angry, angry.

“Cole slaw stealer!” <——–[the whine]

I said it.

He laughed. Only when I didn’t come to the door to help him put on his coat as he headed off to a board meeting did he realize I really was pissed off.

I spent the hours while he was away down in the basement in the dark, working through what had happened to me. I held myself and cried for that little girl who thought it was her duty to offset her brother’s greed with her own self-denial. As if it were on her shoulders to keep yin and yang in balance in the universe. I lay there and explored that anger, that hurt, that hunger.

I regained perspective by reminding myself this wasn’t about Sylvain. You have to know what kind of boyfriend he is to see how removed from reality I was while fantasizing stabbing his hand with my fork. He is the kind of guy who comes up to me almost every evening and offers me a foot massage. He keeps an eye on my water glass and offers to refill it when it’s empty. And he (almost) always remembers to ask me if I’ve had all I want before taking the last of anything at the dinner table. Yeah, he’s a prince, that one in a million guy who does not deserve to have his hand stabbed with a fork.

By the time Sylvain got home, I was able to talk calmly, to apologize.

Eventually, as we always do, we arrived at that place where we are laughing. I am wiping tears and snot and giggling at my own silliness, so happy to have a partner who has the patience and wisdom to stay with me until I get to that place.

We sat there in the dark of the basement bedroom, brainstorming what we can do in the future, such as asking Ma to make up three times more slaw from now on.

We giggled some more.

And with that, today is Day One.

Dream: the Burning Doll House

I can tell something is shifting in me when my dreams break out of their regular pattern of a few set themes (my bus dream, my vacant house dream, etc.)

Last night I dreamt I was at a sort of open house or orientation day at the technical college where I worked when I was in my mid-twenties. We were all milling into the lobby and there was a huge stone fireplace on the far left. My uncle Bill, who died about a year and a half ago, was there and had brought along this amazing doll house he’d built. It was made of separate small strips of maple wood, each strip being about a quarter inch by a quarter inch by two feet. Some strips were blond and some reddish, so that the overall effect when they were glued together to form the walls of this doll house was quilt-like. It was about four feet high and just beautiful. What a labour of love.

I don’t know if my uncle had brought this along as a gift to the college or just to show the students, but there it was, set up to the right of the fireplace. Then to the right of that was a bird house he had also made, but it was just plain pine. Big, but not as special.

The president of the college was there as were some of the maintenance and security staff from the job I’d held previous to that one at the public library.

At some point I came back to this room and noticed that the fire in the unscreened hearth was blazing so wildly that it had caught the doll house on fire. I’d come upon this situation way too late to save the doll house. It was burning up. So I moved the bird house over so the fire wouldn’t spread again to that object and burn it up, too. Then I went in search of the head of maintenance, a white man I did not especially like. (Some part of me knows I have to come back very soon or move the bird house farther away.)

I make the distinction between characters of African descent in my dreams and those who are not because this can be symbolic in Jungian terms. Kali, for example, when she used to appear to me in dreams, came as a large Black woman.

Anyway, I could not find the head of maintenance anywhere. I was feeling frustrated and not so happy about this situation. A fire was out of control in the lobby, it had already eaten my uncle’s masterpiece and was going to get the bird house too, if someone didn’t take control. Desperate just to have someone listen to me explain what was happening, I tried pulling aside Raymond and Vernon whom I knew from the public library. But they were there as guests, and were not on duty as maintenance and security on these premises. But at least they could listen, right? Wrong. While I was talking, Vernon walked off to the bar to order a drink.

I gave up getting anyone’s attention and went back to the lobby only to find that all evidence of the out-of-control fire had been cleaned up. Both doll house and bird house were gone.

======

I woke up feeling agitated. Sylvain helped me play analyst…

Q: What was I doing the day before?

A: Mostly reading and digesting some material my mom mailed me from a work called The Tao is Tao, a section on how to reduce ego.  Was also reading A Return to Love and the teaching was starting to sink in on a whole new level.  I realized I have not yet reached that point of surrender in all aspects of my life. Ego is still trying to run things.  I spent much of the day practicing ignoring thoughts of the past and thoughts of the future whenever they would arise.  Without past or future, I felt naked and vulnerable one minute, but unbelievably peaceful the next.

Q: What is uncle Bill’s essence?

A: Stability, status quo, good provider but also very narrow minded and opinionated. He thinks he has it all figured out, has an answer for everything. But he and my aunt were there for me after my father died and Mom had to be with my brother at L.A. Children’s Hospital for a month or more at a time. At six, I was dropped off there in New Mexico and…well… I loved it. It was the stable, normal, 2-parent family I didn’t have.  No little brother with his centre-of-attention disability, just two very kind older cousins who became surrogate siblings to me.

It Has to Be Somewhere

Tell me I am not the only one who does this. My old friend Mark J, the one for whom I am doing the Green Party pamphlet translations, told me once that he also sometimes does that just before falling asleep. He suggested that perhaps he had been a monk in a former life and that this habit–an extreme form of self-denial for Sadhus and other ascetics–was so ingrained that it followed him into the next lifetime.

Yeah, I can see Mark as an ascetic monk.

Me? I think I just do it to entertain myself.

Tibetan Hello

They let us go before noon Friday, the last day of the 2-week job search course. I was needing a change of scenery and so didn’t head home right away. Instead I hung out downtown for a few hours. At a used bookstore, not finding Be Here Now or A Course in Miracles, I purchased instead A Return to Love and a modern version of the I Ching.

At Coffee Exchange there are two bright, sunny alcoves facing the street. The owners have put a lovely leather club chair and small, rustic end table in each of these niches so you can sit and sip your latte and watch the people passing by on the sidewalk. I settled in one of them with my new books and a cup of tea.

To my right and across the aisle five or six middle management types who work in the core were enjoying a lunch break together.

As I opened and began to read the Marianne Williamson book, a woman whizzed by on her electric scooter and stopped right in front of me. She was older and had a few crumpled bags of belongings stuffed into the basket on the front of the scooter.  One of the young businessmen started to get up to open the door for her, but she gestured that she didn’t want to come in.  She was just checking the place out, I suppose. I was trying not to stare right at her, but she was almost directly in my line of sight.

As I was waiting to see what she would do…come in or keep going…she abruptly turned her head the 3 more degrees it took to meet my eyes and she stuck out her tongue at me.

???

I stuck my tongue out at her in return, and her sour face melted into laughter.

I laughed, too.

She started to speed off, but stopped again directly in front of the table of office types and stuck her tongue out at them, then sped away.

The businessmen were all abuzz.  Did you see that? She stuck out her tongue at us. One of them turned to me and saw me smiling.

“She stuck her tongue out at me, too.  I stuck my tongue out back at her,” I said. “A greeting is a greeting,” I added with a shrug.

The Universe has such a bottomless bag of tricks for calling us back to Her.

Banana and Day One

I went five days this time without complaining, criticizing, whining or gossipping. So far my attempts at going 37 days complaint-free look like this: one day, two, four, six, six, five. Yesterday was fine, too, until bedtime. Then I was hanging out with Sylvain after we returned from seeing Gone Baby Gone, which we both liked, by the way.

It wasn’t any one major thing, but it was two or three small things I felt added up to busting myself. For one, what started as a neutral observation about other people began to slide toward things you would not say of them if they were there in the room with you. That’s the definition of gossip I am borrowing from Carla. Then there was a tiny complaint. And there was some brief discussion of others’ behaviour that I had to admit was judgemental, critical. Yeah, I definitely had to go back to start. Do not pass Go, do not collect $200.

When Sylvain saw my disappointment in having to start back at Day One, he reminded me, “As a GIFT, not as punishment!“

Gift, schmift.

As we lay there winding down from the day and having a snuggle session before I left to go sleep on the mattress that does not give me back pain, I wanted to talk more about how to recognize when we’re headed down that path and what we can do to nip it in the bud and turn things back to positive energy. I was feeling that if I’m ever going to get past day 6 or 7, I’m going to need a few more tools.

“We need a rescue word,” I said. “Like a secret code word to remind us to turn things back around.”

Sylvain was amenable.

K: I think my rescue word will be “let’s think of something positive we can say about X to turn this around.”

S: That’s quite a word. I think my word will be banana.

K: Oh, my gosh! That is an awesome rescue word. That would totally make us start laughing and change the energy of the conversation just like that. Magic. Oh, you’re so clever.

S: <grin>

K: Would you let me share your rescue word? It’s the best.

S: You could have pineapple.

K: No, banana. I want banana, too. Banana is the best.

S: Okay.

= ====

This morning as we were getting dressed and ready for our Saturday, I began to talk about someone. The tone was completely factual and not charged with any emotion, yet I’d only gotten three words out before Sylvain interrupted with “BANANA!”

I stopped and realized what I was about to say served no purpose at all and was very likely going to lead to judgement or criticism.

“Thank you, sweetie.”

Then another time I started to tell Sylvain about an old woman I saw downtown yesterday. “Banana!” Sylvain said, again to bring me to awareness.

“No, it’s okay. This is a story I would tell even if the woman were here with us. She would like it, too.”

You might like it, as well. So I will tell it next.

Giving Thanks

Though Canadian Thanksgiving was a month ago, I welcome today as a reminder to me to make a gratitude list. There are SO MANY THINGS for which I am grateful today, I don’t know where to start or stop.

I am grateful for each of you and for your teachings. In you I have found community, and that sense of community is the main thing keeping me sane these days. I thank you.

I am grateful for the Be Brave project, which–though I didn’t participate every day–helped me find the courage to go to a job fair several weeks ago. That led to my dropping my resume in a box marked “Career Development Services” for free employment counselling, which in turn led me to the Net Success course that I finish up tomorrow.  The 2-week course has been priceless with regard to knowledge gained, but has also provided structure to my days…a blessing in itself.

I am thankful for Sylvain’s family and all the small and large ways they embrace me and make this time of transition more bearable.

I am more grateful than I can ever express for my love. He is one in a million.  One day I was watching a video Jessie recorded on her blog about her devoted dog Louis that demonstrates why she sometimes finds it difficult to work on her thesis. Olivia left a comment: “Oh, if husbands could only be so affectionate.”  Well, some partners ARE that affectionate. I asked the Universe for my dream partner, and I got him.  He is sensitive, caring, supportive, communicative, in touch with his feelings… I could go on and on, but that is a whole other blog post.

Today I am grateful for mild winter weather. I did not have to put on long johns to ride the bus downtown today and to me, any late fall or winter day in Canada not necessitating long underwear is a good one.

I am grateful for all the spiritual guidance that has come my way lately in the form of your words, videos and poems I find on your blogs, your book recommendations and techniques that work for you that you’ve taken the time to share.

I am grateful for my health.

I am grateful for Canada.

I am grateful for one more day of life.

Zen and the Art of Ironing Pants

In a thread on Hamguin’s Hide-not,  Rick and Sylvain were chewing on the whole issue of what happens to that energy of frustration or anger or irritation when you don’t complain.

I have not read the book, so I don’t know if Will Bowen addresses this, but I imagine he surely does. I only know that I joined this Complaint-free challenge because it so beautifully complemented the practice of being present that I had just embarked on.  Were I not also practicing consciousness and mindful breathing in each moment, I am not sure how far I could really get with the whole Complaint-free thing.

For me there are two kinds of days during the Complaint-free 37 Days.  There are the days when I am simply squelching the vocalization of my inner whinging.  On those days I feel like I’m trying to swim upstream in a river of molasses. Remember your breath. Oh, look! There’s my irritation. Hello, irritation! I say yes to my irritation. Blah, blah, blah. I think I’ve allowed the irritation of that moment to dissipate, but five minutes later I am again struggling.

On those days, I feel heavy. That’s how I felt the day of my last meltdown. I recognized I was feeling very irritable around others, and so I went to my cave-like room in the basement. I knew a walk in the fresh air would have been better, but I ignored that voice and went downstairs instead. Then when Sylvain came down for our Sunday check-in, I ended up losing it.

Then there is a day like today.

Today I feel like I’m coasting. The farther I get into both these commitments, the more I find there are very long periods when I am mindfully breathing. That half smile Thich Nhat Hanh talks about is there on my lips.  I am here and it is good. Nothing that happens around me diminishes me, and I am free to be fully engaged in life.

A day like today makes me very glad that 22 days ago, I decided to commit to 365 days of mindful breathing. It has only been three weeks, but already things are becoming SO. MUCH. EASIER.

So I guess what I’m trying to say is that if the energy of irritation / anger / annoyance isn’t successfully transmuted into something else when it arises,  it will build up and…as Sylvain puts it…cause the tops of our heads to blow off.

I am first to admit, however, that some circumstances are simply more challenging than others. The other night I was tired from all day in class followed by grocery shopping followed by getting the meal prep done for the next day’s dinner and I still had a bunch of ironing to do. I should have done the ironing the same day I did the wash, but instead I had set it aside thinking I would do it the next day. But the next day held a commitment to someone that lasted all day and wiped me out.  I know that–even though he didn’t complain–the laundry rack was in Sylvain’s way in the tight bedroom, and I just needed to get it done.

I like ironing shirts but I do not like ironing dress pants.  I just don’t.  So my challenge was to find a way to be present while ironing the pants. You know I am very fond of games and tricks for getting myself to come to the Now.  So here is the one I made up for ironing the pants.

I pretended that I was already dead and I had been dead a long time. I missed life on earth, missed having a physical body, missed all the things that come with being incarnate: smells, textures, colours, sounds.  I pretended that I was having this little chat with God and I said, “you know, I sure would like to spend just one more hour on earth in my old body.  Just one more hour and then I’d be ready to let go and get on with the next stage.”

And I pretended that God said to me, “Ok. I can arrange that.  But the deal is that it is going to be an hour ironing pants. Do you still want me to beam you down?”

That is how I found a way to be thankfully alive during every minute of ironing pants.

Long Germinating

And then there was Rick saying, “Ram Dass is fascinating to listen to and to watch, even more so since his health issues. You can literally see/feel what he is feeling, as it crosses his face. His life has been a blessing to me for well over 35 years.”

And then there was I wondering what he meant about his health issues. So I went to his website and found out.

And then I was remembering the first time I heard the name Ram Dass.

I was sixteen years old and was headed to Miami, Florida on a Trailways bus with my best friend, Mia. We were somewhere in Georgia, I think, and got out when the bus driver said we were stopping for a little while. We wanted to stretch our legs.

The sun was shining. We wandered around the outside of the diner. I remember grey asphalt and a low concrete wall on which a young man with long hair and beard and ragged jeans was perched. He was sitting on that low wall with one bare foot on the wall and one dangling, and he was glowing. He looked to be just a few years older than the two of us.

In his hands was a book, and he wanted to share with us the beauty that was welling up off those pages and nourishing him. He asked us, two little flowers passing by his space, if we had heard of Baba Ram Dass. We said we had not.

He told us that Baba Ram Dass was amazing and we should read him.  (I never did.)

He was very excited as he told us what had just happened to him. He was keeping a journal as he wandered, but that morning his pen had run out of ink.  “So I went into that drug store there…and I bought another pen!” he told us. “And with tax it came to twenty three cents! And that is exactly how much money I had left in my pocket…twenty three cents!!!”

We left him there basking in Ram Dass and the meant-to-be-ness of his new pen.

No, I didn’t leave him there, did I? He has been with me for twenty-eight years.

And Again Day 1

Have you ever noticed blog synchronicity? Yesterday four or five of the bloggers I visited were talking about mindfulness or conscious breathing. I am especially grateful to Lorilyn for this video of Ram Dass interviewing Thich Nhat Hanh in which they talk about transforming anger. I watched it three times.

Last night I had a meltdown that has put me back at Day 1 again. In Jungian terms, I “went unconscious.” I spoke from ego, purely from ego. Gosh, that leaves such a yucky taste in my mouth.  How very timely the video is for me today as I ponder and play with the practice of inviting the energy of mindfulness to be there with the anger, to take care of the anger the way a mother takes care of a baby.

Breathing Day 19, Not Complaining Day 6

There is amazing power in this breathing thing. I find that the most important time for me to remember to become aware of my breathing is when I am just waking up. That is when my mind tries to grab hold of me with its wily tricks and put me in a funk.  I often wake up feeling agitated.  My mind says, “you slept too late,” or “I don’t want it to be morning yet,” or any number of things that trigger feelings of guilt and dread.  I can cause all of it to come to a screeching halt if I remember my breathing.

My belly is rising. Falling. Rising. Falling.

I am okay here in the field of Now.

Look at the fern-shaped shadow cast on the wall. Listen to the water coming through the pipes as someone upstairs runs a faucet.

Listen to the silence surrounding the sound of the water in the pipes.

There is always just this moment. The present moment is all there ever is.

I can handle that.

Tagged for Seven Random Things

Wow, I am floored by the response to my last post. You people sometimes blow me away with what you consider an interesting post. I thought what I was writing was terribly boring and wordy, but did it anyway because two people wanted to know more.

Ok, well, Angela of Eclectic Recovery AND Rick of Hamguin’s Hide-not have tagged me to post seven random things about me. First, I am supposed to list the rules, so here you go.

• Link to the blog of the person who tagged you.
• Post these rules on your blog.
• List seven random and/or weird facts about yourself.
• Tag seven random [?] people at the end of your post and include links to their blogs.
• Let each person know that they have been tagged by posting a comment on their blog.

1. The slight malformation of my right outer ear was supposedly caused by forceps during delivery.
2. The only food I don’t like is anchovies.
3. Two foods I won’t eat whether or not they taste good are fois gras and veal.
4. It doesn’t embarrass me to CAW CAW loudly to crows when I see them, even if there are lots of people around.
5. When I was young (age 9 to 16 or so), I used to wonder a lot what life in prison would be like.
6. I have never been pregnant.
7. I am comfortable with death and dying and sometimes think about volunteering in a hospice setting.

I am tagging the following seven people and anyone else who wishes to do this.

Patti of Welcome to My Universe

Sylvain of AbitibiSouth

Brandi of Dandelion Seeds

Darlene at Daisies

Jinbon H. Wrong (aka Sloop John B) at Trouble Every Day

Sukipoet of Paint, Poems and Ponderings

Lizzi of Elizabeth’s Blog

There, I AM capable of following rules. Sometimes.

Up or Down or Sideways?

You say you want to hear about the interview? Ok.

The ad was for a tech support position at a company that supplies a very sophisticated and comprehensive software application to businesses in a certain industry with which I have no familiarity.  So many times when I see postings for tech support people, they want computer science grads who can troubleshoot hardware and network issues. That’s not me.

I am a liberal arts grad who happens to be smart and energetic. I love helping people and I really get a charge out of creative problem solving and troubleshooting.  In my last job–the one I held before moving here to Windsor–I supported a little software application and also an interactive web based application.

Even though 98 out of 100 tech support ads  rule me out with requirements such as knowledge of SQL or Java, I keep reading them because the odd employer is looking for someone who doesn’t know anything about code or networks but who can walk a user through the screens, stay calm and patient and resolve problems.  That’s me.

The phone interview with the president went very well. He was looking for a quick learner and good communicator with some knowledge of accounting. We had good energy between us. So he invited me to drop in and see him for half an hour, warning me that this was very preliminary because he has to go slowly in filling this position. He has to be sure that the candidate is right for the job, but also that the job is a good fit for the candidate, as well.

During the half hour I spent talking with the owner of this company, I learned a lot more about the firm and the position.  The company employs about 12 people, almost all of those coders or tech support people. There are a couple of people who also handle sales, but no management per se. It’s a lean operation: the owner/pres and the technical staff.

The position he was looking to fill is an addition, not a replacement. This person will spend about six months cramming, trying to learn the software inside and out. This would entail many hours spent watching training videos and reviewing old logs of resolved problems. The trainee would spend the first month sitting in a senior support person’s office so as to be able to ask questions whenever they come up.

What the owner emphasized over and over was that for the first several months, the trainee is a liability to the company, not yet contributing any value. After about 6 months, the newbie starts to contribute and by the end of the first year should be ready to start going out into the field to help with installation and training of new customers.  That is the whole goal of that position: to get someone up and running so they can be out on calls all over North America for one week at a time, with those trips coming at a frequency of no more than one every six weeks or so max.

Owner also added that he has more customers than he can currently accommodate. The waiting time for installation is at five months, which is why he needs to add another trainer who can travel.

A lot of emphasis was put on commitment. He wants this trainee to be absolutely sure before accepting the position because, as he put it, “I can’t have any turnover at all. None.” And while I got the feeling that he pays well enough to ensure such complete loyalty, he came out and said that he does not begin providing that incentive to stay until after the trainee goes from liability to asset, and then will be compensated according to how valuable s/he is proving to be. Starting pay is not attractive.

He quizzed me about my strengths and experience. My strong suit? I learn quickly. I pride myself on being able to turn into a walking encyclopaedia. Yes, I have some accounting background, so I could walk clients through reconciling a bank statement that is out of balance.

He warned me that the job could be stressful. This software isn’t just one module, it runs the client’s whole business from logistics to bookkeeping to commodities trading. When it goes down, the client does not have a sense of humour about it.

When I left the president’s office, I felt very good about my chances of being promoted to round two of the interviewing. He asked me to do some reflecting after our visit and then send him an email letting him know how I felt about it. I thanked him and said I would.

That night I used Sylvain as a sounding board, because I didn’t know yet what I wanted to write in that email.   I was feeling torn in two directions. One part of me was screaming, “you can do it! You’ll learn that software faster than anyone ever has. This will stretch you more than you’ve ever stretched, challenge your brain, force you to grow in ways you’ve never pushed yourself before.”  The other little voice was asking me if I really wanted the stress. There was another voice I wasn’t even aware of until Sylvain and I went in the den and closed the door behind us.

Do you WANT to try for it? That’s what Sylvain was trying to pull out of me. I sat in the YES chair and I sat in the NO chair.  Sylvain has a way of helping me see clear to my own true feelings.  As he sat there holding both my hands and looking at me in such a loving way, I realized that I did not want that job.

And then the tears came. Not a lot, just one or two slipped down my cheeks as I felt that third voice surface.

I began to speak: There is a part of me that thinks I don’t have the right to say no to this opportunity.  Here I’ve been without work since summer. What would people think if they knew I pulled out of the competition?  Am I going to appear lazy? Spoiled? Too picky?

Sylvain didn’t want to influence my decision. He was withholding his own opinion. But I asked him please to share it. So after a bit of tooth pulling, he admitted that he has really been enjoying the new me. I laugh and smile a lot now. I am fun to be with. How would I handle the stress of a job like this?  He also wasn’t too keen on the travel part of it.

Sylvain helped me see that the only part of me that wanted this job was my ego. When I was younger, I always had to prove I was the shining star. I was the apple polisher in any class. The first row, hand-raising, A+ making smarty pants. That was me.

And now? Now I can look at Mr. Ego jumping up and down and chuckle.

Now the idea of a lower stress job is very appealing to me. The conflict I feel inside comes from the fact that IN GENERAL, the more stress and responsibility you take on, the more the job pays. For the past 20 years, I have been climbing the pay scale.  So this tech job seemed to me to be the next logical rung on the ladder that keeps going up. More, higher, more. Don’t stop climbing.

When I see the posting for receptionist at the YMCA Immigrant Settlement Program, I think how cool it would be to greet new immigrants all day long and help them find their way. I could practice my Spanish and Farsi and maybe even my Portuguese. Who knows. But it pays an amount I left behind ten years ago.  If I were 65 or 70, it would be socially acceptable for me to start sliding back down the pay scale. But at my age it is not acceptable.

Well, that is something I will continue to grapple with for a while. The wonderful thing is that Sylvain just wants me to be happy…whether that means taking a low-paying but rewarding job in a non-profit setting or a part time job or no job at all, he supports me.  And that makes me very blessed indeed.

Third Day Not Complaining and Still Breathing

Being aware of my breathing is good. It helped me stay grounded all day instead of getting nervous about the job interview this afternoon. Laughter is good, too. This comment from Jinbon H. Wrong (Trouble Every Day) cracked me up. Can you Complaint-free participants relate?

Say, are you allowed to say “doggone it”?

How about just one really big complaint per day?

Or one really long string of complaints (a whine)?

Or suppressed complaints (you start to complain, but then draw up short)?

Or a mulligan? (you know, a throwaway complaint that you don’t really do your best on)

Vespers complaints? Matins? Noon whistle complaint?

Wake/Sit up in the middle of the night complaint? Surely you could be forgiven that?

An “I don’t really mean this, but …..” complaint?

An misdirect complaint: “Someone I know said this – (complaint)”

A complaint blog (ah, there we go) you don’t really say them, just write them. Alternatively you could write them on a chalk board, then erase them immediately.

Anti-complaints: turn your complaints into happy talk- “Its been raining for five straight days and I couldn’t be happier.” “My knee pain feels just right today.” “This soggy food is the best I have ever had.”

Here’s a complaint: “I think this guy could probably rattle on forever.”

Breathing Day 14, Not Complaining Day 1

I did really well on the not complaining front yesterday. But slipped over the line just so very briefly on criticizing and again on gossipping. Sylvain and I talked about it. All my slips come at the end of the day when he is using me to debrief from his day. He was apologetic, but I said, “hey, I have it easy right now. Think of how hard this must be for people who go to work and interact with dozens of people through the day.”

It’s okay. Today can be day one again. I am learning so much about myself and about the nature of negativity.

Today was the first day of a 2-week course I’m taking on Internet job searching. Being in the class was a great opportunity for me to watch my ego. It was fun to observe one teacher’s ego doing a little dance with a student’s ego. Who is the alpha male here? I could feel my own ego doing the same dance with a female teacher, just like two wolves circling and sniffing each other. I floated back and up and became the observer. I smiled.

Now I’m back home with 20 pages to read for homework, as much translating as I can manage before bed and also grocery shopping in preparation for my weekly cooking day tomorrow. Since I will be in class all day, I’ll get everything ready tonight so that in the morning all I have to do is plug in the slow cooker (stew) and when I walk in at 3:30 I can start the corn bread.

Oh, and that job posting that screamed my name the other day? I had an email from the president just now asking me to call him. (You know, one of those small companies where the owner wears the HR hat, too.) We had a nice pre-screening phone interview which resulted in his asking me to drop by later this week so we can get a feel for each other up close. So Ma is loaning me the car for that on Thursday.

I glance up at a jet leaving a wiggly white contrail on the azure sky and smile. It is mild out. The setting sun is hitting the top halves of yellow-gold maple trees and casting long shadows on the rooftops.

Breathing Day 12, Not Complaining Day 5

It really does get easier.  I am finding that now in any given situation that has the potential to trigger complaining in me, I think: solution or acceptance?

Dropping criticizing and judging feels good.  Gossipping is a bit harder, because any conversation about a third party can hit that slippery slope toward gossip. When is it gossip?  If this is becoming gossip, now what do I do, leave the room? Steer things back to facts? Say something to remind us all that we are slipping toward judging or hearsay? Maybe we just never talk about people who are not in the room.

The last couple of days and today have been so lovely. There is harmony in the household. We work together so effortlessly when we give each other the gift of acceptance.

Sylvain and I took in two movies during the Windsor International Film Festival: ONCE and Persepolis. Both are very much worth seeing.  The first one left me playing Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova’s music over and over the rest of the night.

This morning Sylvain was about to make pancakes but there was a rotten egg hiding in the box. It exploded in his hand, splattering his clothes.  The smell was strong. Without missing a beat, we simply moved to the solution. I accompanied him back upstairs to facilitate a quick change of clothes and we started a load of laundry. Ma stepped in and poached us all some eggs.

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Sylvain had noticed a couple of months ago that each Wednesday when I cooked, his sister M asked a lot of questions. How do you know to do that? Where did you learn that? She told me she had always wanted to learn to cook, but can’t learn from her Ma. I understand. I can’t learn painting from my mother. I could learn from a stranger, but not from my mom.

Sylvain said to me one day, “if you want to offer M a cooking lesson one night, I’ll do the dishes.”  And so I made the offer.

Although she was very nervous about the whole idea, once she accepted and we started shopping yesterday for the ingredients, she was geeked.

“I’m gonna cooooook, I’m gonna cooooook,” she said to nobody in particular in a taunting sing-song way over and over throughout the day.

The meal came off without a hitch. We work well together. I like her quiet sense of humour.

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Tonight was our Sunday check-in. Both Sylvain and I notice the change in our relationship brought about by what I am practicing.

It is good.

Bits of Joy

I just took some recycling to the curb and oh, my goodness! It is so lovely outside. I expected cold, but it’s just fresh and beautiful!

Today I want to share some things with you from other people’s sites.

Cheryl of Art in Every Day–besides making mandalas–does this thing called SoulCollage, which you can check out here if you want. It is a little bit like what Patti Digh is proposing today. Well okay, not exactly, but they are both about cards and creativity and inspiration.

Please look at these mandalas by Marianne in Holland. Are they not spectacular? Looking at them just fills me with joy. Some of them move me almost to tears. It is as if the Universe is speaking to me through them.

Patti of Welcome to My Universe has been colouring with crayons. Oh, oh. Please scroll down to see all the ways she has been playing in colour lately. So many juicy pictures! Looking at these makes me smile and feel like dancing a little jig. Maybe I will do the Gratitude Dance. Yes, I think I should get up and do that now.

Breathing Day 9, Not Complaining Day 2

Yesterday I felt mired in drying cement. I sat on the bed scrolling as I do every day through the postings on Job Bank.  Sylvain had left for work and I was sitting there nursing my sore muscles, wondering which would be less painful–going ahead with my weekly (voluntary) obligation to prepare dinner for this family of five or ask Ma if she would mind switching days with me.  Oh, well… I had several hours to figure that out.

The grandfather clock chimes every quarter hour.  Pa mumbles to himself as he shuffles about the house.  He spends a lot of time out in the yard doing the odd jobs he is still permitted by his doctor to tackle. (No ladders, no power tools!)

A walk would do me good but it looks cold out there. I still feel slightly cold from the prior day’s fever and chills.

I summon to mind some passages from Eckhart Tolle.  Remember that this is just the lila, the dance, the divine play.  Why react to the content? Content is always arising and falling in the field of Now.  Nothing stays for that long, Kel.

But I feel so stagnant.  No job, no friends, just these four walls all day long.  It is hours yet before I can even justify a short trip to the grocery store in Ma’s car.

Tick tick tick tick tick.  Breathe breathe breathe.

I hear Ma downstairs talking to the cat.

Finally I drag myself downstairs and into the den.  Ma has brought the mail in and put a package on my desk.  There is actual human handwriting across the front. My name.  I tear open the large manila envelope wondering what it could be.

Oh, RIGHT.  I had completely forgotten that a week or so before, my old friend Mark in Little Rock had emailed me to ask a huge favour. He is state coordinator and national delegate to the Green Party and recently discovered–to his chagrin–that none of their pamphlets  are available in Spanish.  And they have very little budget for the extensive translation job.  The national office was not able to help. I readily agreed to take on the job pro bono since I have a lot of time on my hands right now, being between jobs and all.

I cannot possibly describe for you the change that took place inside my body as soon as I realized my day, my week and coming weeks were now filled with purpose. Important purpose! And oh, I so love translating.  A few years ago I invested in the best Oxford Spanish-English / English-Spanish dictionary to be had on the planet, as an acquaintance who owns a translation business had started sending a few jobs my way when he had more than he could handle.

In a matter of five minutes I went from the mopey girl listening to the clock tick to a wild maniac digging through boxes in the basement for said big honking Spanish dictionary.

Ok, so here’s the real question.  When I was sitting there trying hard to believe that nothing in the world of form lasts for that long, why did my body not fully integrate it?  Why did it take the actual change in content for me to remember the nature of life and the world of form?

The next time I am in a situation that is challenging, why can I not draw upon faith? I know the laws of nature. I have lived long enough to know that what goes up always comes back down. Life is cyclical. Things arise in the field of Now and they vanish again almost as if they never were.

How can I learn to hold onto that knowledge, in easy times and in more difficult ones?

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After several hours engrossed in translating today, I finally thought to do my daily scanning of the Job Bank . There was a completely different energy in me as I pulled the site up. I was actually expecting to manifest my dream job there on the screen.  Well, sure enough, there was a posting that screamed my name.

I fired off a very confident cover letter and attached my resume.  Here’s the cool part. I can feel that had the same posting appeared one week ago, I would not have filled the cover letter with the same energy of confidence.

My friend wrote on the note in the package of pamphlets, “I owe you BIG.”

No, Mark.  This translation job has brought me back to life, reintroducing me to the smart, energetic and very competent woman that I am.  I needed that reminder.  Big time.

Now, does anyone know how to say “Instant Runoff Voting” in Spanish?  :)

Still Breathing, Not Complaining Day 1

This is day 8 of noticing my breathing as often as I can remember to do so.  As for not complaining, I made it to day four.  Then I indulged in some whining, so I get to start over today from scratch.
There is one situation that gets me.  I can accept it and be compassionate toward it once a day, twice a day, three times a day. But at some point I reach my limit.

So I am working on that.  It helps if I look at it as a sort of training. Maybe I am being prepared for something bigger down the road. Maybe my patience and compassion need developing.  When one of these situations pops up, I can just view it as exercise.  A chance to practice getting out of the way.
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My energy is low today, as I am getting over minor fever and chills.  At least I finally know what causes these fevers that I get now and then. I sensed it had something to do with the fibroid because of the accompanying tenderness and pain in that area. There is just no end to the knowledge you can gain by Googling things.  The fibroids are probably going through degeneration or cell death, in which case some chemicals leak into the uterus, hence the pain, and then into the bloodstream, which causes the fever, chills and elevated white count which blood labs revealed the last time this happened on my last day at Green Healing House.  Yes, mothers are expert at making you see a doctor whether you need one or not.

It all goes away in a matter of days after the die-off of part of the fibroid and in the meantime you can use a heating pad and an analgesic for the discomfort.  No biggie.

So if you don’t hear from me, it just means I am in rest mode.

Forgetting to Breathe, Not Complaining Day 3

This post by Radiant Woman resonates with me today. I am having an off sort of day.

Sometimes getting out of my mind trap and back to breathing and the Now is like one of those 3-D pictures you can only see if you relax your eyes and bring the piece of paper slowly within a certain number of inches from your face. Some people can see those, some can’t.  Some days I can do it, some days I can’t.  The picture is always there; the difference between seeing and not seeing is just a matter of a fraction of an inch and not trying quite so hard.

In lieu of a blog post, I give you this quote, which I found on the Complaint-free World Website.

“Complaining is not to be confused with informing someone of a mistake or deficiency so that it can be put right. And to refrain from complaining doesn’t necessarily mean putting up with bad quality or behavior. There is no ego in telling the waiter your soup is cold and needs to be heated up—if you stick to the facts, which are always neutral. ‘How dare you serve me cold soup…?’ That’s complaining.”

—Eckhart Tolle, “A New Earth”