{"id":3456,"date":"2014-05-16T14:49:05","date_gmt":"2014-05-16T21:49:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.coolkarma.com\/dharma\/?p=3456"},"modified":"2014-05-16T14:49:29","modified_gmt":"2014-05-16T21:49:29","slug":"we-work-with-what-we-wake-up-with","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/?p=3456","title":{"rendered":"We Work With What We Wake Up With"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"buddha1\"<\/a>
\nI’m a bean counter by nature.\u00a0 I loved all of my stats classes in college and writing complex macros in Excel was something I use to do for fun<\/i> when I worked in higher education.\u00a0 Math just never lets you down.\u00a0 Or so it seemed.\u00a0 You could count on the numbers to tell you the truth, once you could juggle the books with the best of them and see through the sheer veneer of budget and planning and how people manipulate the charts to make it appear in their favor.<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, I liked scattergrams and projection analysis.\u00a0 So it was no small wonder that I have spent the better part of my healing journey collecting data in order to determine if I was making any real progress.<\/i>\u00a0 At times when I was very ill and bedridden, I use to use a stop watch to count how long I could sit up in bed, unsupported by pillows.\u00a0 Then I would count the number of steps I could walk until I could finally make it to the mailbox.\u00a0 Later in life, when my world began to shrink and I no longer went for long drives<\/i> … I would make marks on a map of our neighborhood to show places that I had been, so that I would push myself to go farther and farther out of what I thought was my comfort zone.<\/i><\/p>\n

What I learned from all of my pencil pushing … was simple common sense.\u00a0 When I felt better .. I could do more.\u00a0 And when I didn’t feel well .. I did less.\u00a0 Despite my scientific nature, there was no rhyme or reason of when I could make it to my next “goal” … sometimes things happened and sometimes they just didn’t.\u00a0 Even though my efforts were the same or greater.\u00a0 The results<\/i> simply did not correlate with my best of intentions.<\/p>\n

You would think by now .. I would have given up completely on trying to find solid ground under the thin ice of my micromanagement.\u00a0 But in truth, the desire to see progress<\/i> … to believe things can and ARE getting better … is so much a part of who I am (human nature) that I still find myself falling into the data trap every now and Zen.<\/p>\n

I wrote a rather long blog about my missing mother, this past mother’s day.\u00a0 It was at the same time my database back-end corrupted and I lost (temporarily) those seven years of my work …. that I decided to look upon it as a sign that I could move forward without rehashing my pain surrounding my mother’s choice to not be part of our lives.\u00a0 However it was in that mental diatribe when her values about “being autonomous” and some sense of sovereignty kept hitting me over the head like a hard wood 2×4.\u00a0 Because for Mom, it was always about being able to TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF.\u00a0 And alas, I do a piss-ant poor job of that.\u00a0 I have a cadre of people around me at all times.\u00a0 Much of the time, I am too sick to get up and do even simple things during the day.\u00a0 But more to the point, I find it comforting to not be alone in this illness.\u00a0 My body does too many unpleasant and unbidden things throughout the day and I find it difficult to manage my wits about me without their help.<\/p>\n

However, Mom’s words still echo in my past-middle-aged brain … and I realize in her eyes (and my own conditioned mind) if I am not taking care of myself, if I am dependent on anyone, than I am not FREE.\u00a0 So this week, I was making an effort to not ask for help.\u00a0 Besides the “little things” like hot packs or glasses of coconut water … if my body flared, I made a point of getting up and going to sit by myself somewhere until it passed.<\/p>\n

More than a week went by … (9 days, and\u00a0 14 hours, but who is counting?) and I was doing a smash up job of it.\u00a0 Mom would be proud!\u00a0 Then last night, I woke up at 5:00 a.m. and felt the dsyautonomic meet and greet of the start of a bad day.\u00a0 I stumbled in the dark to the kitchen to heat up a hot pack for myself and while I was waiting the 90 seconds I watched myself knock on my 20 year old’s door.\u00a0 Dan wasn’t alarmed.\u00a0 It was just me, and I flair all the time.\u00a0 He just turned on the light and sat up as I chatted a bit with him until I felt settled enough to go back to bed.<\/p>\n

I spent the rest of the morning beating myself up for asking for help<\/i>.\u00a0 After all, it had been nine days (and fourteen hours) since I imposed<\/i> upon anyone.\u00a0 Good for me, right?<\/p>\n

When the redneck sage woke up, I told him that I had had a rough morning and after he chastised me for not waking him up he said very firm …<\/p>\n

“You ain’t gonna do that no more.\u00a0 You hear me?\u00a0 You ain’t gonna bean count about nuttin.\u00a0 You know that.\u00a0 We’ve been through this before.\u00a0 It doesn’t help you.\u00a0 It don’t make you stronger, it just keeps you focused on all this stuff you can’t do instead of what things you CAN do.\u00a0 Each day when you wake up, you get to do what you CAN DO.\u00a0 And that’s it.\u00a0 You don’t worry about trying to make some make believe goal.\u00a0 You don’t gotta think about going further than you did before.\u00a0 It don’t work like that.\u00a0 Its never worked like that for you.”<\/p>\n

With soft tears falling slowly down my cheeks I looked up at him “How will I know if I’m getting better?”<\/p>\n

“You don’t ever have to think about getting better.\u00a0 You just DO today.\u00a0 This is all you got.\u00a0 You hear me?\u00a0 You ain’t gonna do this countin’ thing no more.”<\/p>\n

“But its what my mind does,” I said with wet cheeks.<\/p>\n

“Not anymore … ” he said then quickly added, “Cause you’re CURED!”<\/p>\n

And at that . . .\u00a0 we both dissolved in a flood of laughter.<\/p>\n

Its hard to let go of life long patterns.\u00a0 We have such an investment in who we think we are .. or more at point who we think we should be.\u00a0 Who are parents want us to be and how we think society will judge us.\u00a0 So we hold on … even when some things aren’t working for us.\u00a0 Because to NOT have a plan seems more hopeless than abandoning even our ineffective planning strategies.\u00a0 But in my practice, it has always been about letting go.\u00a0 Touching whatever it is lightly as we greet and acknowledge it .. and then letting it go, because we know that everything changes.\u00a0 Some days it will feel like we are walking up hill, while other times we’ll feel carried on a wave of ease and simplicity.\u00a0 But everyday, all we can bring to the table is what we have in that moment.\u00a0 We work with what we wake up with.\u00a0 And that’s more than enough to take us the next step into uncharted skies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m a bean counter by nature.\u00a0 I loved all of my stats classes in college<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3456","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dharma"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3456","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3456"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3456\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3459,"href":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3456\/revisions\/3459"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3456"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3456"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}