No Rest for the Wicked

Posted on July 31, 2011 by Cynthia M Clingan

I am sure you’ve heard a lot about how important sleep is. I see Dr. Oz and the morning shows occasionally talk about sleep hygiene (aka, habits that increase quality of sleep), but I think a lot of people just say “I’ll sleep when I’m dead” or “I work and I have kids, so it just comes with the territory”. I would like to ask you to reconsider the possibility of getting enough sleep every night, and not just that, but going to bed earlier.

I have on many occasions noticed the difference in how I feel in the morning and all day long when I go to bed early enough to be asleep by 11. And this is even if I wake up several times during the night to pee or whatever. Having been an introvert, procrastinator, perfectionist, and student for the majority of my life, I am not a stranger to late nights, short nights, and all-nighters to get more alone time or get stuff done, but I have paid the price, and I know that others have suffered for my sleep deprivation, as well.

A peer of mine says that the 2 most important things you can do for your mental health are to sleep long enough at the right time, and to take a b-complex vitamin. She has done a lot of investigation into brain chemistry and I was quite surprised that these two simple things would be at the top of the list, but I am here to report that I think she is right. Not only that, but I think the sleep part of the equation might even be the most important.

I have been getting nearly 8 hours of sleep every night for about a year now, but still have ups and downs in performance and mood. I have several times tried to institute for myself a 10:30 bedtime, curious how it would feel to do this for even a week, knowing how good it feels after a single night. I have failed miserably over and over again, for multiple reasons: I often don’t feel creative until evening, and then I don’t want to stop when I am in flow. My mind says things like, “boring people go to bed early”, or “I’m just a night person”, or “I didn’t get enough downtime today, so I need to watch some tv until I am ready to go to bed”, or “just one more post/email/chore first”.

The fact is, getting enough sleep and getting to bed early enough (in general, asleep by 11) are irreplaceable parts of self-care, and it’s never too late to start. When you get to bed at the time your body wants to sleep, you are in tune with your circadian rhythm and you get the benefit of the the stress repair that only happens between 11pm and 1am. Your mood the next day is better, your appetite is more normal, and you can focus on what you need to do. These things combined make for a more efficient human being. Which means you don’t need as much time to complete tasks, your friends and family are less likely to suffer your short patience or ill moods, and you get to feel better about being a human! You might also need less sleep than you thought in order to accomplish this if you go to bed early enough.

What if you decided, right now, that the most important thing you need to start doing is sleeping earlier and enough? The need for sleep is one of the first realities we deny. It starts when we’re kids. There’s something fun, more exciting about staying up later. We get addicted to having fun at the expense of taking care of ourselves, then later, addicted to cheating time so we can do more, have more, be more. But who are we kidding? This is a race that has no happy ending. It leads to stress, accidents, irritability, weight gain, illness, and early death. Nobody’s cheating anything here, far as I can tell.

That’s why I’m issuing this challenge to you, and to myself. I won’t apologize or ask anyone’s permission anymore to go to bed at 10:30. I won’t beat myself up if it doesn’t happen every night (like last night when I went to see the last Harry Potter movie) because it’s what you do MOST OF THE TIME that matters. I’m doing this so I can feel my best, be my most efficient self, pay attention to those I care about, and to be able to work out twice a week, take care of the house and garden, and still hold a job.

You could just try it for one night. One week. One month. If you accept your human need for sleep and begin to arrange your life differently to make it happen, you may find it easier to do this kind of prioritization with other things like meals, exercise, and meditation. The sky’s the limit! Consider this the first step on the path of self acceptance, which is where it all starts, where the rubber hits the road. You know all that striving we do, trying to get somewhere, to be happy? Self acceptance is actually the core, the real foundation, of happiness – not the stuff we are pursuing. And, if you care about that sort of thing, there’s a pretty serious body of research that shows this to be true. There’s really nothing to lose, and everything to gain here.

Drop a note if you decide to try it. Share your stories about making it happen. Together we can start a sleep movement! I’m over here doing my part. Hope you will too.

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Don’t Believe the Hype

Posted on July 19, 2011 by Cynthia M Clingan

Okay Kiddies, time for school. Let’s learn how to read some of the junk fired at us daily that tells us what to do with our health. Here is yet another example of how the “scientific” research model (breaking things down into little pieces and thinking we can say something about the whole from it) of finding data to inform health decisions is incomplete: recent NYT article on components contributing to weight gain. Go read it real quick. Two pages, wont’ take too long.

Ready?

So, yay!, there’s MORE evidence that refined carbs are a problem (not that the subsidies for those are going to go away any time soon). And it isn’t just the calories, it’s how you get them. (I didn’t realize we all still believed that, but okay, good!) And, it looks like getting enough sleep matters. But there is little mention in the article about this study (which I do not think I can bother to waste my time reading in full) about the fact that the so called “number of pounds” connected to consumption of each type of food is actually a correlation coefficient, which is a fancy term that means “appears to be related to”. Catch that? NOT “causes”. They did not establish causation here. I’m not even saying they should try. Variables interact, and it is nearly impossible to say anything about the interactions from this article or the study.

The NYT author also makes the mistake of interchangeably using “metabolism” and “weight gain”. NOT the same thing (see 180 Degree Health for more info). Another assumption in the article is that the study matters because low weight equals health. Not so. Folks who are thin, or who undereat and overexercise can be just as unhealthy as the person who overeats and underexercises. Anorexic ain’t healthy, neither is bulimia, and folks with these issues are not typically obese.

Don’t get me wrong – this does not mean I condone soda consumption. Having it occasionally isn’t going to matter much, unless you are severely diabetic, so it all depends. All I’m saying is that the results of this research can be used as helpful guidelines, like: eat more foods in their recognizable state, get enough sleep, and watch the refined carbs. But more than anything, start paying attention to what your body is telling you! When you’re hungry, eat. Don’t eat things that make you feel like crap afterward. Don’t eat things you are allergic to (increased inflammation=increased stress response=increased weight). When you feel antsy, get moving. When you’re tired, sleep. Don’t watch so much frigging tv – you know it – there’s a little voice that tells you it’s not really helpful. That little voice also tells you that if you habitually ingest chemicals, you will pay for it at some point. If stress is affecting your life (and you know it is), get some coping skills or make changes to reduce it.

Alas, this approach requires paying attention…more on that next time.

So what did we learn today? Don’t just believe everything you read without questioning it! Nope, not even this post. In fact the more sure someone is that they are right, the more you better question what they have to say (see the Dunning-Kruger effect).

Class dismissed.

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Health vs. Fitness

Posted on July 12, 2011 by Cynthia M Clingan

I have been more and more interested lately in nutritional health, and in finding a balance that works for me. I am gluten intolerant and have dairy allergies, both confirmed by EnteroLab testing. Went on a Paleo (aka, low carb) stint for a few years and felt great the first year, but started to develop annoyingly numerous food sensitivities and other allergies got worse. I stayed with it for so long because my weight held steady around 129, and with all the scary news about health risks related to fat, I assumed that had to be good.

Then, I wound up deathly ill in December 2010 on the way back to the states from London, caught in weather related delays. It took a week to kick the bronchitis, another couple of weeks to get my strength back, and a few more after that to get rid of the cough. I healed myself, I believe, by eating. I started to cook again, and to eat. I stopped running, only visited the gym occasionally, and I ate like I’d never eaten before. I ate well before, I thought, but cheated a lot with sweets. Now I tried to eat mostly whole foods, including brown rice and potatoes, with abandon, and extra salt and olive oil, please. I was RRARFing.

RRARF is a concept I had read about before the health crash in December on Matt Stone’s 180 Degree Health. It made a lot of sense. The foundational idea seems to be that health is dependent on proper functioning of your hormones, and that metabolism and health are a function of mitochondrial activity which can be measured in a lot of people by body temperature. Key to all of this is the food, and there seems to be an awful lot of damage possible from not only processed food, but also the act of dieting (translated as food restriction OR over exercising, or both). Matt proposes taking your temperature every morning, and eating more and exercising less until you get up to a normal 98.6 (I am oversimplifying, so please check his blog or book for details if you are interested). “More” refers to whole foods, the kind that are still recognizable and come in the original wrapper, and fewer foods high in omega 6 – polyunsaturated fat – vegetable oils, nuts and seeds, and poultry. It also means eliminating things that mess with your adrenal activity like coffee, chocolate, alcohol, sugar and drugs. At least for awhile.

I delayed trying this “diet” due to my running addiction, but being helpless and ill and unable to run at the time, I figured, what the heck. The gamble paid off. I have gained a good degree of health from this approach, it took a while before I was willing to eliminate the sugar (which is only necessary temporarily for most) and the running. My food sensitivities decreased, my mental health has improved, my energy is more consistent, and I gained 10 pounds. I stopped being ravenous after a few months and now eat to appetite and eat more fruits and veg just because I want to. I do still cheat a few times per week, but it’s only when I want to, say, have a hard cider, make homemade custard, walk to Graeter’s with my husband for ice cream, have a square of chocolate, or have a Sunday morning decaf mocha. It’s not a stash of dark chocolate in my purse or at work, or making sure there are always gluten free treats in the house, because I don’t need them anymore.

Exercise now consists of walking (for ice cream and other) biking for errands or to the gym when I feel like it, one strength training and one interval workout per week (each = 20 minutes), gardening, hiking the stairs for laundry, pretending to guard my husband while he shoots baskets, the occasional run when I get the urge (only as far as I feel like), and anything else that sounds like fun (hiking, skiing, rollerblading, tennis, or some other play). This has reduced my stress around fitness considerably. The focus is now on health, rather than fitness at the expense of health, as before (see Body by Science, or Power of 10 for details), and I am much more relaxed, less exhausted, and even seeing signs of the possible return of my libido.

While the hardest parts of this process have been giving up running, detoxing from sugar, and rethinking my body image, the larger process has been about a shift in values, and a shift in approach. Learning to listen my body, stopping the search for the ultimate supplements and fitness and nutrition rules to use for the rest of my life, and accepting that I am, indeed, human, and prone to aging like all beings. My particular health challenges are stress, allergies, and gluten, in that order. As I try to compassionately live with my new body, I am newly aware of something that wants to hang on to an image of a me that is 10 pounds lighter, even with the new knowledge that it may not be possible for me to be healthy at that weight and I might actually need the fat for proper hormone function. I liked to think that I was beyond such madness, that my equating a certain level of thinness with health was okay because I was pursuing a “healthy” level of thin.

I now realize that the sound basis for judgement I thought I was using (liking the image in the mirror) was flawed. Liking that image is based on the conditioning of my mind by advertising, subtle comments of others, meaning I have attributed to numbers on clothing tags, and the science of the day, currently intent on convincing us that dieting, overexercise, and deprivation are the new lifestyle we should all adopt. Ironically, I suspect it is altogether likely that losing the stress about my weight and health could cause some of the 10 pounds to melt away while I’m not looking. The more I read, the more the evidence seems to be mounting in favor of stress as the ultimate health threat.

Consider it for a moment, even without the research – how many of your unhealthy habits can be traced back to stress? How much sense does it make to try to remove the habits without addressing the root cause? Can you imagine a world where you are kinder to yourself,  a world where you regularly practice relaxation, try to do less, take better care of yourself, and develop good boundaries? If you find it difficult to imagine, you are not alone. Societal pressure to do it all, be it all, and have it all, does not make it easy to imagine. But, please, keep trying. Your life may depend on it!

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Treating Depression

Posted on July 2, 2011 by Cynthia M Clingan

I like this post about drug-free treatments for depression I found recently on the Healthy Skeptic. It’s the third in a three-part article, and part 1 and part 2 are linked at the beginning of the post. Even though it’s from 2008, the info is still fairly current.

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Depression, or something else?

Posted on May 16, 2011 by Cynthia M Clingan

Almost all of my clients, and I now have 12, are depressed, or depressing themselves, or exhibiting depressive symptoms – whatever you like. Some of them refer to the handy television commercials in lieu of a description of their actual symptoms –  “I feel like that commercial with the black cloud,” they tell me. Then, it’s up to me to sort out whether to refer them for medication evaluation, or, they ask for a referral, or they might say they will never take medication for depression. It just depends.

Depression is, indeed, a collection of symptoms with physical causes. What is neglected in that statement and the cloud commercials is the connection between mind and body. We think, the thought triggers an emotion, i.e. a chemical reaction in the brain. The more we think we are helpless, hopeless, or hapless, the more we feel that way. The more we feel that way, the more we interact with the world that way, and the more negative responses we get that lead to negative thoughts, and more emotions, and more choices…you see the pattern. It’s a downward spiral. We can only take so much of this negativity until the body shuts down to take a break from the load. By slowing down and withdrawing, it numbs us enough to take a break from the suffering. Our bodies are much smarter than we realize!

I am not personally one who thinks everyone with depressive symptoms should be on medication. I think it always makes sense to try to address the underlying causes, but sometimes medication can help if someone can’t even muster the energy to pull themselves out of bed or whatever black hole they are in to examine what’s making them feel this way. With that in mind, I want to share my perspective on some things to consider before deciding whether depression meds are for you.

  1. Depression can be a side effect of some medications, like blood pressure medication, for example. Read the insert that comes with your prescription, or ask your pharmacist. Don’t be discouraged by a response of “that’s really rare” – just because most people don’t experience a certain side affect doesn’t mean no one does! Rare means some people do have it, and there’s no law that says it can’t be you. Especially if you are: a sensitive person, on a lot of medication that could interact, or have reacted to other medications. Ask your doctor to help you find one that works better for you. There are lots of other drugs to try.
  2. Depression could be a reaction to continuous messages of “I’ll never be good enough”. These messages stem from various sources, such as perfectionism, hypervigilance, and an endless stream of self contempt in thoughts and actions. Lack of self-acceptance and kindness toward ourselves can have dramatic consequences. Brow beating ourselves for every mistake leads to lack of compassion for others, as well. The messages might be aimed at protecting us by forcing us to try to be our best, but this all-stick-and-no-carrot approach is little more than psychic violence. Who wouldn’t eventually give up or have a nervous breakdown being held captive and tortured this way?
  3. Depression can be a result of living in a situation that is stressful, and seems to have no end in sight. Like the battered woman who can’t stay or go, any time we feel trapped we can put ourselves at risk for depression. Staying in the job we hate, the marriage that is over, the friendships that bring us down, can all contribute to feeling hopelessness, one of the hallmarks of depression. Delaying resolution to ethical dilemmas, or any major decision, for that matter, will have its price. It wears us down, sapping our energy and making it harder and harder to take action.
  4. Depression can be a result of poor self care. We pay lip service to self care, when, at least in my book, it is king when it comes to mental health. Skimp on sleep and your coping, patience, focus, decision making ability and mood all suffer. Skimp on food, and you get more of the same. If you are a sensitive person, have a history of trauma, or are in a stressful occupation, and you don’t practice intentional periodic relaxation or exercise, expect your mental health to suffer. If you eat nothing but fast food, live on coffee, skip meals, smoke, do drugs or drink a lot, or eat a lot of sugar, any one of these can wreck your feelings of mental well being. If you have crappy boundaries and can never say no to anything, expect your mood to suffer.
  5. Depression can result from isolation. And being depressed makes us want to isolate. It’s a vicious cycle. The cycle can only be broken by reaching out or letting others in. We humans aren’t meant to live in isolation, and our bodies let us know this when they become depressed.
  6. Grief can become depression. Are you experiencing the sadness that can accompany a loss, or are you stuck? It can be difficult to tell the difference sometimes, and despite clinical descriptions of the time length for mourning, there is no rule for its duration. But, if you feel like you’ve been grieving a long time with little or no relief, it may be time to talk with someone about it to sort out whether it’s grief or depression.
  7. Some legs of our spiritual journey can resemble depression. We might experience the kind of dampening of our emotions and senses that accompanies a spiritual transition, but is not depression per se. It has some similar features, but it is essentially about our spiritual process and not necessarily related to any of the factors listed here. It’s just a sort of emptying out, to prepare for the new. Again, you can check this out with a spiritual teacher or mental health professional if you have concerns.
  8. Natural remedies are readily accessible and have been found very helpful by many people. EFT, meditation, and exercise have been found to be at least as effective as prescription medication, and are free and fairly easy to accomplish. If you are looking for a supplement, you might investigate SAM-E, Valerian, St. John’s Wort, fish oil, vitamin d3, and GABA, all shown to positively affect mood. If nothing else, take your multivitamin, or at least a b complex supplement. Chronic stress depletes your b vitamins, and your brain is fairly dependent on these water soluble nutrients to maintain balance. Since they are water soluble, that means they flush out of the system and you need to replace them regularly. Some people describe the effect of adding a daily b complex to their diet as “like somebody turned the lights on”, and they don’t cost much.
  9. Item #2 revisited: cognitive distortions. This is a fancy word for errors in thought, like black and white thinking, generalizations, and catastrophizing. In short, we all have habitual patterns of thought, to some degree, that are flawed or incorrect, and that cause us continual pain. A common example is when we think since something isn’t the way we expected, then it must be wrong, bad, or ruined. Extreme words like “always” or “never” can be clues. Errors in thinking are ubiquitous, something I teach all of my clients about, and their impact on mood cannot be understated. This will be the subject of an upcoming post. Stay tuned.
To be clear, I am still not saying no one should take prescription drugs for depression. I am just trying to broaden the view, add a little side of options to your main course of black cloud commercial. Way back when I took meds for depression, I wish I had known about these options. I wish I had known how powerful my thoughts were in affecting my mental health. I wish I had known all the side effects of the medication. I hope you find this helpful. I will follow up this post with one with more details on the natural remedies listed in item #6. 


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Another EFT Resource

Posted on March 5, 2011 by Cynthia M Clingan

Check out Patricia Carrington’s site for more great EFT resources. It’s also in our resource list.

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EFT Manual Available March 15

Posted on March 5, 2011 by Cynthia M Clingan

EFT is a simple sequence of points on the body that one can tap on themselves with fingertips to alleviate a wide variety of physical and emotional symptoms. The location of the points is based on the principle underlying the energy meridians which are the basis for acupuncture and acupressure. Several different opinions have developed as to what precise recipe to use, but they all seem to share the foundational principles.

When I first read about EFT on Gary Craig’s website, I thought it sounded a little far out. I decided to try it because, I thought, a) there are no side effects, b) it costs nothing except a little time, and c) an awful lot of people seem to be having results, and d) I was a desperate, second year grad student with flagging motivation. Five years later, I am still using it. Not nearly as frequently, mind you, since it seems that I just don’t seem to need it as much these days.

For awhile, I used to tap for everything, including test and performance anxiety, procrastination, menstrual cramps, neck tension, stomach pain, headaches, flashbacks, cravings, social anxiety, and any time I was feeling overextended, tired, exasperated, or flooded with emotions that interfered with logical decision-making. EFT was also a phenomenal adjunct to talk therapy. I can’t say it worked perfectly every single time, but in the times of  extreme emotional distress or physical pain, it always reduced the intensity of the feelings, sometimes to zero. What’s more, I found, and still find, that I experience relief that seems to continue to grow over the course of a week..

Nowadays, I am guessing, I don’t need it as much partly due to the amount of the “forest” of junk I have cleared from my system during the last five years. I do still use it when I have surprising bursts of emotion not equal to the situation – cut off by other drivers, resentments over the division of labor, and other life stuff – but I can also choose to experiment with waiting for the emotion, craving, or pain to peak and fall. But, when I recognize something cyclic and sense the “stuck energy”, like a broken record playing over and over, I know it’s time to tap.

The inspiration for this post is that I just discovered a new Gary Craig EFT Manual as a book due out March 15. It’s quite affordable (7 bucks and change) and appears to be much more comprehensive and explanatory than the one I learned with. I just cannot emphasize strongly enough how much this technique has helped me with cope with daily stress during a very difficult period, and allowed me to grow past some very painful and entrenched ways of reacting to life. Take a peek at the book The Promise of Energy Psychology, or Dr. Mercola’s EFT page, or Gary Craig’s former home page or resource page, and see if you want to add this tool to your toolbox. You can also find a trained practitioner here or on Gary Craig’s site to help you get started, if you learn better that way. I personally found the in-person guidance to be extremely helpful.

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The M Word, Revisited

Posted on February 28, 2011 by Cynthia M Clingan

I think it’s fair to say that nothing I ever say or write is very original – today the repackaging seemed futile, so instead, here is an excerpt from “Chapter 5: Mindfulness” from The Seeker’s Guide by Elizabeth Lesser:

The mind is like the sky: clear and crisp at one moment, cloud covered and confused at he next. Full of hopeful thoughts now, despairing of the future later.  Angry and agitated, and then kindly, calm. It is a landscape of changing, shifting thoughts. The mind is not our thoughts, just as the sky is not the weather. Mind and sky are containers for life’s continual, creative impulses…

Meditation does not make things miraculously different. It doesn’t give us control over the weather. It doesn’t get rid of a stormy mood and replace it with a sunny one. Meditation does something much more subtle and even more magical. It wakes us up and leaves us standing tall in any weather…

Knowing, understanding, and accepting that life is difficult is spiritual work of the tallest order…

An ocean of ignorance, misunderstanding, and fear lies between our rejection of suffering and our acceptance of it. Crossing that ocean is the spiritual journey…We need a boat for this journey – a snug, elegant craft. Meditation is such a boat.

Do you have the boat for your journey?

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Snippets of Clarity

Posted on February 22, 2011 by Cynthia M Clingan

Sometimes we just need a little boost over the rough spot, not a whole counseling session. Or we can’t swing the counseling, or a day off, or a vacation when we need it. One trick I use when I’m feeling scattered, lost, or stuck is to use quotes that I have picked up here and there to focus my mind for a moment. I have them on sticky notes and scraps of paper and in my journal. I found this one on Adya’s website today:

The mind doesn’t rest as a result of getting its questions answered; it comes to rest when we see through the questions, when we see through the incessant drive to know.

Here’s another good one I used to carry with me from Marianne Williamson’s Illuminata:

Dear God,
I surrender to You my striving.
I let go all need to effort or to struggle.
I relax deeply into things exactly as they are.
I accept life, that it might move through me with grace.
Amen.

Another trick I use is to read a short article by someone like Adyashanti or Guy Finley, or pick up one of my books on spirituality and just open to any page and read that page, and maybe the next. This also works astoundingly well with A Courses in Miracles. You can also listen to Marianne Williamson read lessons from ACIM on Oprah’s website.

Today what worked was an audio snippet called  “The Fire of Truth” from this page on Adya’s website. (BTW, I noticed that there’s also an upcoming live broadcast with call-in next Wednesday, March 2, 9pm EST. He gives a Dharma talk that lasts anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour, and then takes questions. I try to catch these whenever I can because I find there’s always something there to feed me.) I also have dozens of his talks (many are free!) loaded on my ipod to listen to when I need quick focus. It’s interesting, though I listen to the same recordings over and over, it seems that each time I hear something different.

What about you? What feeds you? What do you do to help you remember who you are and how you want to be? Let’s help each other and share below…

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The M Word

Posted on February 21, 2011 by Cynthia M Clingan

It’s late afternoon of a day that’s been mostly under my own power, and I still haven’t put in my hour today. My hour of meditation, that is. The thing I gently recommend to those who find themselves stuck, or stressed, or with racing minds that seem to run their lives. I believe so strongly in the effectiveness of it that it’s on my daily schedule. Problem is, it doesn’t always happen. Why is that?

I still don’t have a good answer. I think it’s partly the fear of having to justify what goes undone as a result of my ceasing activity for an hour. There’s resistance when I think of all the other ways I could “do nothing” for an hour – mindless television, puttering in the yard, tinkering with my beads or pottery or some other craft, reading a magazine, eating, napping, even staring at the wall and daydreaming. There’s a little voice whispering that it’s frivolous, selfish, self-serving. There’s also the voice reminding me of how miserable my sitting time has been lately – truly my mind has been the most annoying, talking monkey I could ever imagine. I can scarcely believe I ever had the peaceful, expansive, refreshing experiences that I once did.

So at times like these, it’s good to remember why we meditate. I do it to be a better coach, therapist, wife, neighbor, person. I do it for other reasons, too. For an entire treatise on the subject, pick up a book like The Buddha’s Brain or The Mindfulness Solution, but here’s the fact: meditation is training for life. It’s training the brain to respond in ways that are more purposeful, less driven by emotion, and more aligned with the flow of life. It makes us wiser, calmer, less ruled by thoughts and emotions, and more able to connect with others and fully engage in our lives. There’s even hard science that demonstrates meditating actually changes your brain and improves your health, but those of us who do it don’t need research to tell us it works. I notice almost daily now that my thoughts are less intrusive, less extreme, less in control of my moods and decisions. I marvel at the drip-drip-drip of my practice that seems to be slowly but surely filling me up with increased capacity for stillness.

Like many others, I originally started meditating with the intention of escaping it all for a little while, and then for various other goals: relaxation response, stress reduction, blood pressure effects, healing, visualization of goals. Some of those things may happen during my sessions now, but they are no longer the goal. The goal, as Elizabeth Lesser says in The Seeker’s Guide, is not to do it because we “should”. Instead we should let ourselves be pulled toward it, for all of the things we want from it – it is okay to simultaneously pursue goals of reducing immediate suffering as well as the long term goal of enlightenment so that we might suffer less to begin with. Lesser says that spiritual practice allows us to make friends with the never ending process of change. What goal could be better than that? Of daily practice she says, “always make sure your goals are your own, and that they spring from a healthy, loving place.” Funny how removing the “should” can give us clarity about what’s important!

If you’ll excuse me now, I have a timer to set…

 

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