Learning To Be Mindful
By 2023, I had recovered from my treatment ordeal, and physically, I was much better. I was at a good weight, and the Verzenio I took twice a day kept it off. I got a hip replacement, and that enabled me to walk without pain for the first time in a long time. I thought things were looking up, but the universe wasn’t done slapping me around. My brother Peter overdosed in a convenience store parking lot; he was 53. My baby brother. I remember how he came home from the hospital in a cardboard box with a tape measure on the side so we could track his growth progress. Herby, Colin, Stacey, and now Peter are all gone to addiction and its complications. His service was the day after my surgery, so I couldn’t go.
This affected me the way everything I am attached to in my life does, with so much emotion. At times, it is too much, causing dysregulation. At first, I cried, but then I could not feel anything. Then, at times, I could not control my emotions, and they would come at inappropriate times and places, with such intensity. It got to the point where it was affecting my daily life. And I can remember sitting in my office, wondering how I would help someone who came to me in the same situation. I have a master’s degree in counseling psychology for heck’s sake. I googled one word, and it started my healing in motion. The word was betrayal.
First things first, I had to CTFD. Calm the fuck down. I am a firm believer that the ability to control your emotions is a superpower. I am not good at that, never have been. As you can imagine, I was called many things because of the overindulgence of my emotions. When we went for family therapy after Peter’s rehab stint, the therapist said I was the emotional barometer for the family. My brothers would call me a Ding*Bat, and an over-emotional woman is pegged as being stupid and hysterical. If you can keep your cool, you can function optimally and therefore be in control. Being out of control is chaotic, and just what my life had always been. The only relief for me was to unleash my emotions. The problem is, sometimes it’s like a dam breaking, and it happens in that rush, too sudden to stop and too much to take back.
I did go to therapy shortly, but the way therapy worked then was virtual because of the pandemic. I tried to do it that way, going through my insurance, but couldn’t seem to make it work. I also had one session with a highly recommended person; I really liked him and thought I could work with him, but he charged $150.00 an hour. Then I remembered I had a therapist several years ago who was the most helpful I had ever been to. Not that I was a therapy hopper, but I had been to a few, and Dr. Armstrong was the best. He taught me how to meditate and to practice four-square breathing, which in yoga is the same as pranayama. I found the tape he gave me and began my new mindfulness practice.
Meditation is something I have been doing for many years. I practice yoga most every day and sit in meditation for a few minutes afterwards. But mindfulness, I found, is helpful in accomplishing something, whereas meditation is for freeing your mind of everything. For instance, if something upsets me, I try to take a breath first. That is mindful right there—the breath, then the thought. See the thought, and ask yourself, Why am I thinking this? Observe how it makes me feel. Then, what do I want the outcome to be, if any? This forces me to slow down. By going slower, I am more in control and more likely to succeed in whatever I am doing, which leads to other good things, like people respecting me. This was the first step for me. It seems like a small thing, but for me it was huge. Now, if I can only make it automatic. But like they say in AA, progress, not perfection.
They don’t teach mindfulness in graduate school. Life taught it to me, and I didn’t begin learning or internalizing it until I could focus on it alone and see that it actually pertained to me. My life had not allowed me to focus on myself for much of anything except the basics, and now I had nothing but time to focus on anything I wanted, especially myself. Those who have been in the midst of chaos for any extended period and then have the stimuli removed suddenly can be left lost and confused. Truth be told, I wasn’t ready. Nothing anyone said, not anything I learned, could help me until I was ready, but once I was, the change in how I felt was dramatic. I still have setbacks, but life is full of setbacks. Life is also ever-changing and forgiving, and I will embrace my humanness and try to learn from it as much as I can. At the very least, I want to try not to be an asshole by being mindful first.