14 posts tagged “bodyliving”

And I'm feeling pretty better, now, which is nice. Kind of nuts to consider that grad school has only made me cry I think 3 or 4 times. Is that even possible? I don't know if it reflects good mental health and spiritual practice, or solid repression strategies.

SLP gets yet more props for listening and being very, very, very nice.

On the up side:

1. Everything's probably going to be fine, really
2. I'm going to respect being reasonably pre-menstrual and emotionally and intellectually exhausted by taking the rest of the night off studying
3. We're making pesto chicken pizza
4. Everything's probably going to be fine, and even if it isn't, the world is unlikely to end
5. I took some pretty sweet pix today:

cat, beautiful

cat, vamping

cat, taking it all in

break in the yard

look up

Reading that last post, I realize I'm not building in mental-health sustaining items to my lists. So:

So I've been hairy-legged for nigh on a decade now. Up through my divorce coming in final, I was a faithful shaver of all gender-prescribed parts, going so far as to re-shave all of it every 3 days, sometimes every day. (Which seems excessive to me, but then I think to myself, well hell, maybe all shaving women shave every fucking day. Sheesh.) When my X left, even though I'd spent years pretzeling myself around to get him to stay, I pretty much decided that from then on out, I'd just as soon get rejected for the woman I am, rather than for any number of someones I'm not.

The decision to give up spending money on razor after razor after shaving cream after after-shaving-lotion in the pursuit of a scrape/razor-burn-free life was easy to make. I had been raised in one of the many hippie capitals of the midwest, a child of the family-therapy and second-wave feminist movements, so I had no shortage of models for the choice, and no lack of friends who dug it. The guy I was dating at the time was a huuuuuge fan of the natural woman, so that was nice, too.

Not to say it wasn't nervewracking that first summer, taking my hairy legs out into the world. Having hairy armpits wasn't a problem at all, for some reason, perhaps because they're just terribly cute hair armpits. People look really weird at hairy legs on a girl, though, and I was definitely self-conscious, especially waiting tables, where your look has a lot to do with your overall pursuit of twenty percent. But the sheer delight of feeling the breeze making the hairs tickle my legs, combined with the remarkable increase in a sense of self-worth that arises from choosing my body as it naturally occurs--that made it hugely worth any social anxiety. I fairly quickly got over any worries, and just let people feel weirded out as they needed to. Their weirdness tends to arise and fall away with reasonable speed, anyway.

Teaching has me thinking about shaving again, though. I dress pretty casually to teach, but I do some version of business casual, especially at the Community College. The cutie outfits I want to buy and wear (if I ever earn enough money to go shopping) simply don't jive with a hairy-legged aesthetic (I will not be shaving my cutie pits), and I'm also not sure I want to put up yet another 'Bodhibound's weird' block for my students to have to grapple with. So I'm thinking about it.

And I get all girly-excited about the pretty skirts I might wear, and all tired-adult excited about not having to deal with an extra level of other people thinking I'm odd. But then I get sad--I think of my legs, which received so much of the short end of the stick of my self-loathing over the years, until I stopped shaving them, which demanded that I confront that I had no right to be so mean to an actual part of my own body. And I get sad--I think of the other girlies out there who actually think that a woman with hairy legs seems somehow unnatural, un-womanine, as if our bodies in their natural state could possibly be unfuckingnatural, the girlies for whom I hope I pose just a teeny little gentle challenge to that kind of normative self-hate.

Sigh. Any thoughts?

Spring break is my favorite all-time holiday, as of this year.

Whooosh, it has been a week. To show the range, I offer a little acrostic of highlights, by day:

Monday, I was on the second day of my rag, but class that night was really sweet.

Tuesday, wasn't bad overall, just hectic, but I did get confirmation that there would be no lecturer positions at my institution for graduating GA's next fall. Also, cramps.

Wednesday, I found out that I got a section of Argumentative Writing at my beloved community college for Spring. Obviously, I was in a great mood all day. I got to make plans to play with a friend over the break. Class that night was a lot of fun. Not much else sticks in my mind. Oh, right, in the shower that night, I found a teeny, tiny lump, which I'm sure will turn out to be nothing.

Thursday, in the morning, I breathed a great deal, and made a doctor's appointment for Monday morning. I had a really good day with my students, and really all sorts of nice things happened, but I felt ill all day--woozy, stomachy, and chills and sweats. Although exactly such a flu has been going around, I spent most of the day sure that this was evidence that the lump I found will turn out to be everything. Went home and was dead asleep by 6.

Friday, today, I till felt pretty shitty all day, but not as bad as yesterday. When I got to work, I found out that I did, in fact, already get a lecturer's position at my institution for fall. Weird world, eh? At any rate, I got a lot of work done, and got to see some really lovely people. I did, however, spend a fair amount of time diagnosing the teeny, tiny lump that will turn out to be nothing.

Yeah, I'm ready for some goddamned spring break.

And it's off to a very sweet start, I'm happy to report, lumps and flus notwithstanding. :) My work is done for the week, and I had the most wonderfully grounding and comforting conversation with the dearest Heartswater. I've got a nicely moderate schedule of social and professional get-togethers, some nice open space to read and think whatever thoughts I'm in the mood for, as well as some great big chunks marked off to do my work. My work, not student work. And a doctor's appointment, scheduled optimistically a good few hours before a meeting.

Tomorrow we get to go to a Basketball-O-Rama, where the women's and men's team from my institution will play a double-header. We get to sit in the VIP area, because I'm being honored (for god's sake!) for being selected by one of the players as his Favorite Teacher or Staff Member at Our University. It really, honestly doesn't get any better than that, for me. I can't say enough to express how truly floored that this kid picked me. It's pretty fucking mindblowing--he was in the first class I ever taught, and I really had felt that I had failed to serve him well, in particular. My gratitude for this one is really, mindbogglingly huge.

For the past few weeks, we've been talking about making a night of it, and staying at some cool hotel for the night. All week, though, whenever I've asked him about it, SLP has kept hedging and kind of acting like maybe we wouldn't be able to go, and I've been really focusing on being cool about it and not being a big, whiny baby. Which has, I'm embarrassed to report, required quite a little more strength of character than I would've hoped.

But who cares now?!? :) We're going after all--he's been just trying to create a surprise out of it! And we're not just going to any hotel--we're going to the hotel of my most starry-eyed fantasies. It's just across the street from the subdivision where I grew up, and it is the fanciest place I ever saw for the first twelve years of my life.

So no lumps for the weekend, damnit! No homework, no research, no reading/responding to student work. I'll not take one note, nor edit a single line of my CV. I'm going to breathe in and out. I'm going to stare at the sea for a few days, in the company of a few people I really like a huge amount. And I'm going to spend as much of the time as I possibly can in the arms of my husband, being really, really nice to him.

May the coming week be Spring Break for you, too,

B

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It's 3:23 in the morning. My schedule is wacked.

I think working on pacing myself might be a good plan. Ever since I caught the responsibility bug, back in my early twenties, I've always worked harder and more thoroughly than I have to. When I waited tables, I lifted what I shouldn't have, went faster than I needed to, took on other people's sections with my own on football Saturdays when they had one crisis or another. In school, the same thing goes, more or less. I tend to think it's less because of pride and fear than it used to be, although that may not be true, but that I do it because it's just the way my brain works.

I have natural tendencies, like anyone else. Some of them must be genetic, because I'm an organic critter and organic critters are written in their genetic code to at least some degree. Many of them, most of them, probably, derive from the fusion of code, chemistry, and socialization. It's been my experience that these tendencies are fluid, that with mindful attention and open investigation and a lot of trial and error, habitual mind can be freed, or at least retrained, to greater and lesser extent, for shorter and longer periods of time.

Whatever. The deal is that some of my tendencies combine to make me a global thinker, a hungry thinker--when I engage something, I see a really big picture, and then I find myself compelled to think it through, as all the way as I can. This affects how I organize. Left to my own devices, I don't. Just like when I waited tables, I'd just take everything that needed done, and squish it together until it fit in whatever amount of time I had available. I've been working on this for years; I'm much better at breaking projects and concepts into parts and prioritizing phases of processes and tasks. But I still have periods, like the past few weeks, where my body indicates to my brain that my brain has pushed my body a little too fucking far.

And then I get tired and it hangs on. And I have to sleep, have to let details go, have to not be on my game for a while. If winter break, for instance, doesn't last long enough to cover this period, then I have to deal with working--studying, teaching, going to meetings, whatev'--while not on my game. That realllllly gets under my skin. I get depressed.

Or maybe I get depressed first, and then some more. That actually sounds more true--crashing from overwork is depression, right? The fatigue, the low-level malaise, the disinterest and the powerful desire to hibernate--those are all symptoms of depression. Makes sense.

But where was I? I actually started this whole rambling meditation with some sort of point....

Oh, right. I started with the time, which is now 3:37 in the morning. I'm awake right now because I drank a kiddie pool of coffee today so I could fire up the old synapses enough to get enough of my work done. I'm feeling shitty about that, because that's what I tend to do when it's almost four in the morning, I'm not on my game, and I'm super, incredibly pre-menstrual. And it was the pre-menstrual thing that connected the time of morning with my point.

In her short poem, "The Overthrow of One O' Clock at Night," Muriel Rukeyser describes the late night encounter with the overwhelmingness of being a complex self in a complex world. She captures the sense of being present with the kindred world--"the little children, half world over being rained on by fire--that's us--calling for help--that's us," young girls dreaming of love in rays of moonlight that fall across their beds, friends, scattered and close to home--and simultaneously being very much alone to be with the self. She closes the poem: "trust. trust in the rhythms. the deep rhythms of experience."

Sitting on the couch an hour or so ago, while SLP slept and I watched Netflixed tv, I heard her lines. I had been getting anxious and self-critical and just yuck, and it dawned on me: "I really am premenstrual. I've had this experience every single month, give or take a few, for 22 years. The rhythms of this experience suggest that I know what it is, what it feels like, what it will feel like, and I know that in 3 to 5 days, it will have passed. I will be feeling very differently than I am right now. I will probably be feeling pretty refreshed, actually, 'cause that's what usually happens."

Plus, I'll probably have had enough rest by then to be back on my game anyway.

I've been listening to Pema's series on "Getting Unstuck" in the car on the way to and from work the past week. Today I was listening to her story about the Dalai Lama. At a retreat with a bunch of Western teachers, someone told the Dalai Lama that when you teach to a Western audience, you have to be mindful that their natural tendency is to take that teaching and use it on themselves. That we take a teaching and use it to be shitty to ourselves because we aren't it enough, or don't do it enough, or whatever. The Dalai Lama apparently took a long time to wrap his head around this, because Tibetans (perhaps because they're not drenched in a few thousand years of the doctrine of original sin? of the doctrine of the mind/body binary?) don't have self-hate.

But we Westerners surely do, eh? ;) My patterns of overwork/crash and intense emotional experiences of PMS have been with me most of my life, but I still manage not to see them a lot of the time. Instead I run trips on myself about how I'm still a fuckup because I just can't change my patterns, or whatever. That is what Pema/Shambhala teachings refer to as shenpa--the state of getting hooked in a reality story about our momentary experience, even when we know better, even when we don't. Pema teaches that shenpa is a naturally occurring experience, that even as we try not to have as much shenpa, we probably always will, because it is part of experience.  That therefore the right practice in relating to shenpa is the same one as for everything else: to greet it with warm regard and lively curiosity, to experience it without grasping or rejecting, to return to the breath and watch as shenpa arises and as it recedes.

Outbreath. Pause.

Pema also teaches that there is an opportunity for a joyousness in staying present with shenpa or other pain or discomfort--a joyousness at the ability to be present and aware, even while in pain or discomfort, rather than deadened and locked in battle with the self while in pain or discomfort, thereby creating more suffering. I don't know if I'm experiencing great joy at the moment, but I am experiencing a lot of ease and spaciousness at the same time as my achy muscles and tired eyes and unquiet heart. I'm feeling fond of foolish me, also, which is very, very nice.

I'll go to bed in a few minutes, and breathe and lie around, and probably fall asleep pretty soon. Before I doze, I might enjoy thinking about cool things, or have some quiet in the mind, or maybe worry a lot. We'll see. I'm fairly sure I'll experience all of this again, too. But if the "deep rhythms of experience" are to be trusted, and I think they are, I'm also pretty sure I'll enjoy a lot of very nice days in between, and then after again.

And that is very nice.

Namaste and g'night.

Since reading Een's VoxMemoir post, I've been phasing through moments of warm reflection on the connections--intellectual, creative, and very, very dear all around--I've been making as a Vox reader. I say reader because, although I'm entirely delighted by the lovely writerly accommodations in the neighborhood, it's the opportunity to listen and respond that I've been really getting into lately.

I'm developing a real collection of people I like to think with here on Vox, and that's my all-time favorite kind of people.

I've just read Random Musings' post on "January in the frost belt." It's a jewel of a post--concise and tightly structured, but with great sense of spaciousness within. This formal aspect of the post sums up what she's expressed in language and imagery perfectly--"concise and tightly structured, but with great sense of spaciousness within" is pretty much what winter in Michigan feels like.

Sometimes that's the sun through a cluster of icicles when it's bitter cold, but shining so bright it dazzles and awes. Sometimes it's thick, low, gray clouds and tires endlessly rolling through slush. Something about winter up here, its incessant endurance, slows time and opens it up: sometimes into an inner warmth; sometimes to a great beauty. Sometimes, though, to a keen and unsettling sense of timelessness, of the eternal stoplessness/startlessness.

Seasonal Affective Disorder. Honestly, I don't know anyone up here who doesn't meet the DSM criteria for this one. I don't think this is as much a psycho-physical disorder, as it is a geographical disorder. When you live in a location where it's really, really fucking cold and dark and gray and windy and wet and cooooooooold a lot of the year, feeling depressed at least part of the time is just really, incredibly, mindbogglingly likely.

I've always said that God doesn't send the weak to be born in Michigan. Winter up here can break even the most determinedly macho son of Dixie, and the keen edge of winter can even be sensed in the culture of the other seasons. But the emotional/spiritual strength this climate requires and develops offers rich rewards as well.

Up here where winter is long and gray, we have the opportunity to engage with the rough edges of the human life span. This opportunity is often not a pleasant experience to be sure, but the more we are able to meet it anyway, to sit with it and greet it with warm regard and lively interest, the more we just breathe into it--then--the longer our summer moments grow, and the deeper and richer our ability to stay present to that luxe warmth, that languid greengold...

People do a lot of things that confuse me, boggle me, and get on my nerves. I do not mean to imply some sort of macho misanthropy--I'm nowhere near that cool. I really do like people, profoundly. I like 'em individually and in groups; I like the ones I pass on the street, the ones I know well, and even some of the ones I'm blood-related to. My liking of people is generally so severe that it has been known to get on the nerves of some of my friends.

But seriously, sometimes they do things that irritate me endlessly.

One of my scholarly interests is erotic textual culture. At this point in my academic career (read: grad school, teaching, zero time for my own scholarship), my activity in the field is pretty much restricted to following Susie Bright, Porn Perspectives, and keeping up with a handful of erotic culture blogs. And I have recently noticed something in the blog discourse that gets on my damned nerves: the use of synonyms that border on the euphemistic.

The word "tryst," in particular, drives me nuts. No one has trysts anymore. The tryst is an event that happened in the past, for me, and one that really tends to happen in the reasonably past past, like the turn of the 20th century. In the modern moment, I just find tryst pretentious, regrettably perfomative, distancing, phony, phony, phony. After the 1970s, the 80s, for god's sake, Americans are simply incapable of the kind of innocence that could sufficiently enliven the word tryst to be useful in a narrative about getting tied up and fucking. I mean, come on.

It just makes me crave honesty and want to read some Elaine Scarry the minute exams are done.

From American Heritage dic * tion * ar * ies, via Answers.com:

syn·o·nym (sĭn'ə-nĭm')
n.

1. A word having the same or nearly the same meaning as another word or other words in a language.
2. A word or an expression that serves as a figurative or symbolic substitute for another.
3. Biology. A scientific name of an organism or of a taxonomic group that has been superseded by another name at the same rank.

[Middle English sinonyme, from Old French synonyme, from Latin synōnymum, from Greek sunōnumon, from neuter of sunōnumos, synonymous. See synonymous.]

Wikipedia has some interesting things to say on the subject, too.

From the same Ameri * dic/Answers.com source:

eu·phe·mism (yū'fə-mĭz'əm)
n.

The act or an example of substituting a mild, indirect, or vague term for one considered harsh, blunt, or offensive: “Euphemisms such as ‘slumber room’ . . . abound in the funeral business” (Jessica Mitford).

[Greek euphēmismos, from euphēmizein, to use auspicious words, from euphēmiā, use of auspicious words : eu-, eu- + phēmē, speech.]

And Wikipedia, again.

Before I start my work today, I'm taking a minute to read "Choosing Peace" by Pema Chodron in Shambhala Sun Magazine. I still have a huge list of shit to do; my students still have multiple, multi-part needs; my various bosses still need me to do/be a lot of things; my partner still needs my presence, kindness, and profound warm regard; my friends and family do too. But pausing to listen to Pema is as important as everything on those lists, because she teaches:

When things happen to you that you don't like, you can either open the wound further or you can heal the wound. Instead of getting strongly hooked into thoughts like 'I don't like,' 'I don't want,' 'It isn't fair,' 'How could they do this to me?,' 'I don't deserve this,' or 'They should know better,' it's possible that you could train yourself so that the natural intelligence becomes stronger than your reactivity.

She doesn't teach that in hooking with my habitual mind of victimization and return-aggression, I'm failing, or that I should be able to immediately, permanently reverse the hook. She teaches that there is the possibility that I might have some success with doing things in a way that works more productively, more gently.

I wish I could find a copy of the picture that accompanies the article. It's fantastic--a full page head-and-shoulders shot of Pema: she smiles at me through this page with real warmth, real gladness at being present with at least the idea of me. She projects namaste: the god in me bows (with warm delight) to the god in you. In liking me, or the idea of me, with such willingness and perseverance, she teaches me the possibility she's talking about.

I see this picture, and for the first time, I really start to understand the practice of keeping photos of your teachers in your meditation space. It really isn't object- or person-worship; it is accepting a teaching, accepting the model and invitation of being unconditionally warmly regarded.

Hmmm...

For you, the best photo I could find on the web:

Pema