From Shame to Self-Acceptance in 45 minutes Flat

This morning in my group Zoom meditation I made an enormous faux pas. In the middle of the 45-minute session, I loud-whispered to my partner Nancy in the kitchen that our dog Freckles had already eaten. My friend Jessica, also on the Zoom meditation texted me that I wasn’t muted. I quickly put myself on mute and then entered into a shame spiral.

My whole body got hot. I became unable to concentrate and though I stayed on the video call, I could not resume my personal meditation. My head was spinning and, with every rotation, spitting out a new criticism. “You’re so stupid.” Swoosh. “You’re a moron.” Swoosh. “You don’t belong here.” Swoosh. “You’re an embarrassment.”

As these disparagements flooded my psyche, I willed myself to do what I often do to get myself out of the negative thinking pattern. “What is the opposite of shame?” I asked myself. “Love, acceptance, belonging.”

When I have been on the other side, witnessing someone who did something embarrassing or humiliating, I have felt compassion for them. In a way, their blooper is a gift, a reminder that we are all human. And mine this morning was too. I gave the gift of making a mistake, something probably every person on that call has worried about doing at some point. 

I thought about all of these people who’ve I’ve meditated online with for the last fifty days. Every morning, meeting each other before the sunrise at 6 am to sit together and, in our own ways, pray for healing for ourselves and the world. 

When I interrupted the flow of our practice it was a blip in time. For them, a minor distraction. I know that they didn’t feel what I felt. They didn’t think I was a loser, that I didn’t belong. They probably didn’t give it a second thought after it happened. 

In my shame mind, these people would be spending the day gossiping about the nitwit who wasn’t on mute during meditation. But as I contemplated this intrusive shame-thought I realized how utterly narcissist and self-important it is. And unrealistic. That two-second interruption was just that, a two-second interruption.

At the end of the daily meditation, we all unmute for a moment to say goodbye. I thought about saying something like, “I’m so sorry you guys….. blah blah blah” but I decided not to. I thought about my mistake like the gift that it was — an invitation to being human. If I self-flagellated, worried, and asked for forgiveness from the group, I would be telling my friends that, if they’d made that same mistake, I wouldn’t be forgiving of them. I would be saying it’s not okay to be human.

So, like every morning I just smiled and waved. I had found my way to the opposite of shame. Like I do every morning, I felt the love and acceptance from the group. Shame was nowhere to be found.

Intentions are like Butterflies

For the past month, I have been doing a group meditation with my teacher Astrid. Between 10–15 of us meet on Zoom every morning from 6:15–7 am. We start the practice with an intention. My intentions are always simple — joy, peace, love, compassion. I have been a meditator for twenty years but I often skip days, sometimes even months. I notice a difference when I engage in a more devoted practice. I feel lighter, happier, more connected to myself.

The dictionary says an intention is something you aim or plan for. In meditation, it is also an opportunity to acknowledge what is already there. If my intention for the day is joy, then I call in a memory of joy, a time when I felt it. Then I let it fill me up. The intention to feel joy is possible because I’ve felt that feeling before. It is already in me and so it is possible for it to visit again. 

If my intention is joy, I just need to call joy out, to invite the feeling into my consciousness more deliberately. When the feeling comes, it is like a butterfly has been released, the awareness of being free and alive and beautiful. There’s a lightness in my chest, an ease in my shoulders and jaw, a smile radiating from my heart. In that sacred time of meditation, it is like I am in a little tent, warm and dry, lantern-lit, with my intention like a beautiful butterfly circling me as I sit with the memories, images, and sensations that emerge from the presence of joy.

When my meditation is over I begin my day. I don’t actively think about my intention again but it is with me. The more I invite the intention in through a daily meditation practice, the easier it is to call it out the next time. Over time, after enough invitations, the butterfly that originally stopped by in the tent is so comfortable visiting that she hangs around even when I’m not in the tent of meditation. If I invite her in enough, she becomes so used to being with me that she perches on my headboard at night while I’m sleeping. Eventually, she might even sit on my shoulder keeping me company while I move around, living my life.

When I meditate I am the only one awake in the house. Everything is dark except for the small candle I’ve lit on the table in front of me. My dog Freckles usually sleeps beside me, snoring away, his warm back gently rising and falling against my leg. Every morning my intention is for the day ahead. I meditate on the main floor of the house, my partner Nancy is upstairs, and my daughter Lucia is downstairs.

Once I feel a sense of joy or peace or love, when I’m in the tent with the beautiful butterfly, I imagine two beams of light coming from my body — one going upstairs to Nancy and one downstairs towards Lucia. My tent becomes bigger, filled with butterflies, silently floating above my beloved family as they sleep. 

In those moments I am somewhere else, fully ensconced in an alternate reality. I am splashing in the waves of the feeling I’ve called out, basking in the rays of joy or peace or love. It’s a wonderful, enlivening feeling and I feel happy there. But after a few minutes, or longer if I am lucky, I come out. I come back to earth. I make my oatmeal and let Freckles out. I get ready for work and greet my family. But the butterflies are still with me. They are settling in, inside my body, still there, always there.

Every day is an opportunity to invite in an intention. Sometimes it is the same one as the day before, sometimes it is a new one, something else I need or long for — peace, freedom, love. Whatever it is, it starts with an invitation into what is already there. Through meditation, we are not trying to change ourselves. We are simply exploring what is already within us and gently calling out what we want or need to feel in that moment.

Bolognese AND Black Beans

Pulitzer prize winning author Annie Dillard said, "How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives."

Of course! But what does that truly mean?

As I get closer to my half-century mark on this planet, I question how I live my life on a daily basis. Who am I? What is my purpose? Why am I here? I used to worry more about my legacy. What would I be remembered for? What actual products would there be to commemorate my life's work? The older I get, the more I realize that I'm not actually that important. I'm a mere spec on the earth, so what I do in the eyes of the world isn't that significant. It's knowing that I'm living as my truest, best self that feels important now.

My meditation teacher says that one of the reasons we meditate is to clear our minds in order to get closer to our intuition. "Intuition," she says, "is very patient. It will wait in the shadows until we are quiet. Then it will show up."

We've all had a clear moment of hearing our intuition. It's a deeper sense of knowing, a true clarity. Most of my decisions that have stuck, I now know were based on intuition. The decision to leave social work, for example, and open a yoga studio was completely spontaneous, ill-advised, and ultimately perfect. Other big life choices that have crumbled around me, I can see were based more on processing, contemplating, over-intellectualizing. Going to the best college I got into, for example, and studying a major that was familiar and comfortable, didn't actually pan out all that well for me.

In my 48th year, I've committed to becoming a student of intuition, to learn more about it, to work more from that place on a daily basis. The truth is, it's just easier. I get so tired of weighing pros and cons, talking to multiple people to get their perspectives, struggling to make big decisions to the point that I lose sleep, weight and hair!

So every day I start small. Last night I had the house to myself. Normally when I get that much space, I indulge in stupid television that no one else wants to watch. I've rationalized that this indulgence, though not actually that satisfying,  is well-deserved and I should take advantage.  Last night though, I tried to get to my intuition instead of my regular pattern. I listened. It was a slow process and many times I nearly defaulted to turning on the laptop and opening Netflix. What happened instead is I found myself in the car heading for the grocery where I bought ingredients for two meals (even though I was the only one at home).

I spent the evening making a huge vat of Bolognese and enough black beans to roll two hundred burritos. In the process I listened to the chanting music that normally gets poo-pooed in my house.
This morning, my intuition was simply to eat a pear before drinking coffee.

The waiting is the hard part. The stillness before the knowing can be a struggle for those of us who feel anchored by being in control. But the payoff is immense. There is a feeling of ease, of calm, that comes from trusting your gut, from listening to intuition. It feels right. It's definitely how I want to live my life.

Twelve minutes

On January 1st of this year, I committed to meditating three times a week. I've gone in and out of regular meditation practice many times, so I didn't have supremely high expectations that I'd succeed. To my happy surprise, though, I have meditated daily with the exception of three of four times where my days were extremely out of the norm. On January 15th in the New York Times, there was a great article, "Breathing In vs. Spacing Out" (by Dan Hurley) in which psychologist Amishi Jha described her research training United States Marines in mindfulness meditation. Jha found that, "getting as little as 12 minutes of meditation practice a day helped [the] Marines to keep their attention and working memory-- that is, the added ability to pay attention over time-- stable." I don't have any first hand experience with being in the military, much less being a Marine in combat, but I can imagine that having a keen ability to focus and concentrate is of the utmost importance.

In this blog over the years, I've written a lot about busy-ness-- my own, that of other people in my life, of the world at large. For many people, being frantically busy has become so much the norm that they don't even question it. But what if it really did take as little as twelve minutes a day? Would people actually squeeze out this time from their already busy day to improve their overall quality of life?

I have only myself as an example. Since I recommitted to a daily meditation practice, I have added to my already full plate: a major home remodel, a big business opportunity, and an online class in real estate. Here's what I notice: I am a better listener, I am less overwhelmed with the largeness of some of my undertakings, I am happier.

In Hurley's article, he shares other research by Yi-Yuan Tang who, in studying the effects of mindfulness meditation, found, "that it [mindfulness meditation] enhanced the integrity and efficiency of the brain's white matter, the tissue that connects and protects neurons emanating from the anterior cingulate cortex, a region of particular importance for rational decision-making and effortful problem-solving."

My renewed commitment to meditation happened before I read this piece in the New York Times. It was inspiring to read about improving the integrity and efficiency of my brain's white matter. I love knowing that a short daily mindfulness meditation can help soldiers develop better mental resilience in a war zone. But what I knew, even before I read that ground-breaking scientific research, was that my daily meditation was my gift to myself. There are days when it feels like I can't squeeze out my meditation time-- there are lunches to be made, laundry to be folded, flooring samples to choose. These are the days when I feel like I am disappearing into the details of life. Giving myself 10, 12, 15 minutes of mindfulness meditation every morning reminds me that, no matter what else is going on, there is still room for me. Twelve minutes.

Don't think about that stuff, you're meditating.

Most of my life I have been a New Year's curmudgeon. I obnoxiously espoused how silly resolutions were, how absolutely unrealistic and empty they were. Im sorry if I offended anyone. This year, in an effort to help my 9-year-old daughter Lucia (still hopeful and optimistic) understand the concept of resolve, I made a "Goals and Dreams for 2014" chart. It's basically a big piece of butcher paper on our wall with a jar of sharpies next to it. It is an open invitation for anyone to write their goals and dreams for the upcoming year.

For some reason, introducing "Goals and Dreams" instead of "Resolutions" helped me. I found myself happily writing three of them: meditate three times a week; do sit ups; and stop eating sweets for the month of January. I felt different committing to actions that I perceived to be for me as opposed to resolutions that I historically viewed as punishments. All of the things I committed to on our Goals and Dreams chart were things that would help me, so even though they might be hard or restrictive, they were gifts (goals and dreams) that would make my life better. It is January 17th and I can proudly report that I've accomplished my goals and dreams successfully for 17 days straight.

The trick for me with the meditation has been to keep it really short and sweet. A short 5-10 minute meditation (depending on the rush factor associated with any particular morning) is what I'm committed to. About two weeks ago Lucia asked if she could meditate with me in the morning. I've mediated with Lucia a handful of times in the past but nothing regular. Now most mornings Lucia wants to do it. "Mom," she'll ask when she wakes up, "did you wait for me to meditate?!!" To my great surprise, Lucia really loves this morning ritual. We sit in the living room cross-legged, facing each other, set the timer, close our eyes and breathe.

I explained the first time we meditated together to try to just focus on her breath and keep her mind as clear as possible from other thoughts. Last week after the harp-tone of my timer alarm sounded and we slowly opened our eyes to see each other, Lucia said, "Mommy, while I was meditating, I kept thinking about other stuff, but then I'd remind myself, 'don't think about that stuff, you're mediating.'"

"That's meditating," I explained to Lucia. "You're teaching your brain to quiet down."

That morning after I dropped Lucia at school I went to take a yoga class. During Savasana I listened to Frani coaxing us into relaxation. "Inhale let your belly rise...." My mind, as it often does, wandered. I thought about the work ahead of me, scheduling piano lessons, toffee bars, and eventually landed on my morning meditation with Lucia. Wise words from a nine-year old helped me calm my brain down, "Don't think about that stuff, you're meditating."

Relaxing is hard work

During a recent treatment, my acupuncturist told me to relax my leg. He was doing a crazy manipulation. I was on my stomach and he had my leg in the air. It was like I was doing one leg of locust pose without the arms under my body. He bent my leg at the knee and told me to relax. I couldn't!!!! I tried every relaxation technique I know. The more I tried to relax, the more my hip contracted, my toes flexed, my quads bulged. "I'm trying to relax" I mumbled into the massage table with embarrassment. Being a skilled professional, the acupuncturist was kind and supportive and told me to just do the best I could.

On Fridays I teach yoga at Lucia's school. The kids are 5, 6 and 7 years old. Alexander is the youngest in the class. He's just five, having barely made the cut-off for kindergarten. The first day of class I taught the kids Savasana. I dimmed the lights, put on Deva Premal, and guided the kids into relaxation. Everyone tried. And of course they fidgeted. Even adults fidget. But Alexander was like a little rolled up sleeping bag. His eyes were clenched shut like a scary movie was playing. His little tiny palms were squeezed into fists, and his toes curled under in pre-high dive formation. Every Friday now, I try to help Alexander relax. I peel his fingers open and massage his hands. "Ow" he says. I rub his arms "Ow." And his toes "Ow". Each week he's a little better, a little more relaxed, but he struggles. It's a lot of work for Alexander to relax.

Last night at Prayer Square*, like always, we started with a five-minute silent meditation. Only five minutes. Usually I at least go through the motions-- be quiet, focused, still-- but last night, I just gave into my distractions. I yawned. I played with the pockets on my new pants, I even opened my eyes and spied on the other people a few times. But then, when the bell chimed signifying that our five minutes was over, I snapped into attention from a deep deep deeply relaxed place. I'd never been to a place like that while meditating, especially in five minutes.

There is something to this whole idea of being where we are, giving in to the experience of being okay not being okay. We are where we are and oftentimes that's not okay, or appropriate, or perfect. I spend a lot of time trying to do exactly the right thing. Put the right amount of money into savings each month, eat enough fiber, send thank you notes. Yoga for me is the time in my life when just doing what I am doing is exactly right, even if it is not exactly right. Yoga gets me to relaxation because there is no "supposed to be". Sure a practice exists. We hold to a physical form, but internally, mentally, emotionally, there is wide open space. While not always applicable in the general operating expectations of daily life, this is a good lesson. When you're all jacked up like Alexander in Savasana or me at the acupuncturist, try being okay with that. Maybe, like my unexpected surprise in Prayer Square, you'll find yourself relaxed anyway.

*Prayer Square is group of women friends I've been meeting with on a monthly basis for close to ten years. We meet monthly and have intentional conversations, sometimes about specific topics, sometimes based on what is going on in our lives.