I’ve been toying around with the idea for awhile, but seeing @maybemindful’s blog was the true catalyst. I saw her blog and said oh, wait! I want to do that too!
My life has been utterly blog-less for the past four-ish years, which is strange. During what seems like a small lifetime ago, I wrote the Panic About Anxiety blog over at psychcentral.com. (I let it die back in 2014, shortly after my dad died.)
But there’s always a tiny piece of life hiding in any death. That very same year, I accepted a position as a full-time instructor of marketing and management. And I’ve been very, very busy loving the shit out of my job ever since.
And now it’s time to finish up my last few doctoral courses and embark on that “dissertation journey”, as they call it. And that’s where this blog comes in, frankly. I want to organize my thoughts without using APA style. I want to use the word shit. I want to write about the tension between theory and practice: of being able to rattle off 27 different definitions of mindfulness yet not being able to sit quietly by myself for three goddamn minutes.
So, yeah. Here I am. Imperfect and nervous, but (semi?)focused and hopeful.
While I’ve played around with meditation before, I never really held myself to its committed practice. I’d get excited about it for a few days, cozying up with Meditation Oasis podcasts after dinner, but then I’d drop the habit out of boredom or inattention. Or both.
But for the past ten days, I’ve been using a meditation app called Headspace to get me meditating more habitually. I can’t even remember where I’d first read about it — probably some Reddit thread, which is where I usually find enjoyable things and then forget the source — but I’m now hooked on creator (and former Buddhist monk!) Andy Puddicombe’s creative approach to easily-digestible ten-minute meditations.
That’s why I love them — even though they’re only ten minutes long, and according to his TED talk, that’s plenty of time to spur considerable changes in the brain:
So, with continued meditation practice, I hope to accomplish three main things (which Puddicombe says are, indeed, possible):
I want to see my thoughts — particularly the thoughts of anxiety, worry, and stress — as ideas that simply pass in and out of my head. I want to see them come and go without latching onto them. That’s the key — without latching on.
I want to become more comfortable in my skin. Whether I’m a bit jumpy with a racing heart, or feeling dumpy and exhausted down to my bones, I want to learn to accept that. To notice and acknowledge without judgment. (After all, isn’t it the judgment of our feelings that causes additional layers of mental distress?)
I want to stop being so afraid of doing nothing.
I’ll elaborate on that last point: not long ago, I went to a local park and sat down on a bench. And that’s all I did — I sat. No phone, no book, no coffee cup in my hand.
Sure, that’s not really headline-worthy stuff, but I felt uncomfortable — like passersby were judging me. Why is she there? Why’s she just sitting? She must be up to something.
For some reason, I felt like the act of sitting and doing nothing might be interpreted as cause for concern. Why do I think this, you might ask? Well, maybe it’s a holdover from my teenage years and all those “No Loitering” rules my friends and I broke (and often got in trouble for). But as an adult, I need to remind myself that it’s perfectly fine to sit for the sake of sitting — and to do nothing for the sake of doing nothing.
But often, we forget this. I forget this.
The “Take Ten” meditations on the Headspace app (free on the iTunes store) are bite-sized stepping stones that (I hope) will lead me — and perhaps you? — toward these goals.
(By the way, given that I’m doing a lot of Headspace gushing right now, I should tell you that they are not paying me for this blog post. Some bloggers do things like that — they get a few bucks or a free product or service in exchange for some favorable words. I don’t do that sort of thing. I truly love this app and its meditations!)
Ever since my dad passed away three months ago, my brain has been busy. Busy, cluttered, and disorganized.
I’ve felt so mentally disorganized, in fact, that I’ve had a difficult time writing. (This probably isn’t news to any of my regular readers who have noticed the lack of blog posts lately.)
I have about seven half-written blog posts in my “drafts” folder that just…don’t…make the cut.
They’re sloppy. They’re scattered.
And I, too, feel sloppy and scattered. I’m grieving the loss of my father, handling his estate (and by “handling”, I mean “drowning in paperwork regarding”), and preparing for a brand new full-time job that starts…uhm, tomorrow.
That’s a lot of slop. And a lot of scatter.
But am I blaming myself for the cognitive fog that’s crept in? No.
Am I getting angry at myself for being unable to put together a jigsaw puzzle of words on a blank page? No.
Adding anger or self-hatred into this Trifecta of Overload wouldn’t help to solve anything. It wouldn’t make me feel better, it wouldn’t make my recovery more speedy, and it certainly wouldn’t help me to keep my anxiety levels in check (which, graciously, have not spiraled out of control more than a handful of times since my dad died).
STORIES STUCK BETWEEN BRAIN AND FINGERTIPS
I hope to tell you all the full story soon — I’ve been trying to now, for months — of my dad’s death. It’s something I want and need to share with the world — especially you. The anxious. The panicky. The agoraphobic.
And why? Under the weight of such stress and sadness, a panic-riddled Summer Beretsky managed to survive. I managed to travel. I managed to blankly roam the aisles of Jo-Ann Fabrics the day after he died, shopping for memorial scrapbook supplies and funeral-bound photo frames, without collapsing.
I managed to do a lot of shit I never thought I’d be able to do. The shock, I think, helped me to plow a path I wouldn’t have otherwise been able to tread.
In time, I want to tell you how I did it. I want to share stories, advice, tears, frustrations, and my list of woulda-coulda-shoulda. The story about how my local mental health care system failed me on the night of my dad’s death. And the story about coping with all the asshats on the internet who said my father deserved to die. Oh, and how I got my father an obituary on the national news (because once an overachieving daughter, always an overachieving daughter, right?)
But until I can get my brain on track again, I’ll be — well, trying to get my brain on track again. I’m working to tame the messy jumble of muck in my head that spits out phrases like “messy jumble of muck” because, frankly, muck isn’t something that jumbles, is it? But my brain decided to hand me those words, in that order, so…yeah. Take it.
You know what is helping me out, though? Mindfulness meditation.
Yes, meditation — and lots of it.
I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow, but until then, I have a question for you — other than the magical thing that is time, what’s helped you to deal with grief? Has any form of meditation ever helped you to cope with loss?
mindful nerves 