Why doing things you hate is a good thing.

Today was my eightieth day in a row submerging in a glacial lake. My neighbor and I started the ritual on November 29th. Every morning at 7:30 am we go down to the corner of my block, cross the busy road, walk down a tiny hill, take off our boots, and wade into the ice-cold lake. We estimate the temperature is about 39 degrees. The air is usually a little bit colder, sometimes a lot colder.

My goal is to make it to one hundred days because by then the water will be warmer and the spring bulbs will be up and it will feel like summer compared to what we’ve been doing these past few months.

Every morning my neighbor and I look at each other right before we go into the water and ask each other why we are doing this. We laugh and then we do it anyway. After wading chest-deep in the water for a minute or two or three, we count to three together and go fully under. We try to stay under the water for several seconds. Then we pop up, smile at each other, wade back to shore, wrap ourselves in our towels and robes, and climb up the little hill to go home.

I feel compelled to go into the lake every day. Last weekend I trudged through ten inches of snow to go into the lake. It felt amazing like it does every single day. The moments when I am walking slowly into the lake I feel brave. In the minutes I stay in the lake, feeling my thighs tingle with cold, I feel more brave. When I conjure the will to submerge fully for those last few seconds I feel the most brave. And when I am done I feel victorious. 

The other day I was whining about going in the lake to my family. “I”m scared,” I said, “it’s soooo cold today.” My sixteen-year-old daughter said, “Mom, why do you do things you hate?” I had complained the night before about having to get up at 5:30 am for my meditation class and she’d obviously been listening.

“I do them because even though I might not like it in the moment, I know that I’ll feel good afterward.” And that was one hundred percent true. My daily meditation sets the tone for my day. Though I sometimes struggle out of bed, I am always so grateful an hour later. 

And it’s the same with dunking every morning. I fret about the cold air, or the rain, or the snow on the ground, but once I’ve dunked into the frigid lake I feel amazing. I’m refreshed, invigorated and so proud.

A few days after my daughter ribbed me about doing things I hate, she and I were both in the kitchen. I was making coffee and she was cutting an apple for her breakfast. I reminded her to take her iron pill, a task she hates doing but needs to do because she’s iron deficient.

She took her pill and looked past me. Then, as if thinking out loud to herself she said, “I need to start doing more things that I hate. Not a lot of things. Maybe just one thing a day.”

I just smiled and said, “I think that’s a great idea.”

The Psychic Told Me To Start Writing

 

About ten years ago I went to see a psychic. She was recommended by several of my yoga teacher friends. I was in the middle of separating from my partner and I needed someone to tell me something different than the persistently self-defeating thoughts running through my head. When I arrived at her tiny office in a corporate building overlooking the lake, I was surprised to see a very young woman, at least ten years younger than me, with long flowing hair. She was very relaxed, so calm. She looked like she had just returned from an afternoon picking poppies from a field with Dorothy.

She asked me to stand in the doorway while she circled my body with a smoking bundle of sage. When I was sufficiently cleansed, she invited me to sit in a chair across from her desk. I told her a bit about myself, but not too much. That would give her a leg up and I wanted to see if she was the real deal. 

The first thing she said to me, in true random psychic form was, “Your daughter needs to be around horses.” At the time my daughter was not even five; she had not mentioned horses in her short life. But I noted the psychic's instructions and patiently waited for more guidance.

She told me to use malachite to recover from my breakup. She said I should wear a necklace or a ring with that stone. And then she told me that I should be writing. “Writing what?” I asked her. 

“I’m not sure what you should write about, but you should be writing. Start now.”

That weekend my neighbor gave me an old malachite ring to wear and we took our kids to the suburbs to ride ponies. My daughter threw a tantrum about which car seat she wanted on the ride home and seemed completely indifferent to her equine experience. She hasn’t mentioned horses since.

A few weeks later I took my daughter to see my parents in Arizona. I was running my own business, a yoga studio, at the time, constantly on my email, fielding phone calls, figuring out advertising, promotions, taxes, putting out a million little fires.

I needed a break and my parents were glad to entertain their granddaughter while I lazed around. But having nothing to do made me antsy. After I exercised and drank coffee I couldn’t figure out what to do with myself. Without childcare or work, I felt blank.

I went to my mom’s computer to check my email and before long was wandering around the internet looking at different blogs. Within an hour I had created a blog of my own and I was writing. On that vacation, I wrote one blog a day and I’ve continued to write it regularly for almost eleven years. 

The blogs started more as lessons that I could share with my yoga students — thoughts about the symbolism of different postures, analysis of competing with ourselves in yoga….

These more trite life lessons eventually bored me and I found myself diving deeper. I wanted to understand myself more completely and if the lessons that served me served others, then that was a bonus. But I stopped writing for the masses and focused on my own inner musings. I think that’s the treasures started to appear.

That psychic was wrong about horses and right about writing. When I write I become a clear channel. I find my way to buried treasure. My default mind, the one that exists when I am not writing, is like a circus monkey. I throw bananas, juggle oranges and scratch my armpits, all within a few seconds. Linear thinking is not my strong suit.

But when I write, it is as if I am working my way through a maze, slowly, deliberately getting to the endpoint where the truth will be revealed. When I write I am imposing a mental rigor that doesn’t exist when I am in my default thinking. I write every day to find my north star, to understand what is real and true in the messy room that is my mind. 

I don’t always know what I will write about. Most often I don’t. I start with what I am thinking about in the moment, and then I wander. It is as if I am walking a shell-covered beach. I see lots of beautiful shells. I also see some garbage. But at the end of the walk, I find that perfect shell, that impeccable sun-bleached sand dollar without a chip or a crack that I can take home and put on my windowsill.

When I look at the sand dollar later, it will remind me of that walk, what I saw, what I thought about, what I learned. At the end of each writing, there is that takeaway, the perfect sand dollar — a lesson, the sense of knowing something that I didn’t know or understand about myself before writing. 

That psychic suggested that I write but I did not understand back then that writing would be my compass, the tool that would help me navigate from confusion to clarity.

When I write, it is as if I am coaching my subconscious into trying harder to understand or uncover what I actually know. For me writing is not necessarily a way to learn something new, it’s more about unearthing what’s already there, those jewels of wisdom that are clanking around with the clutter. 

I am so glad that I listened to that psychic.

Sisterhood Revisited

My sister Amy and I are both writers. She’s a real writer. She got her MFA in Creative Writing. She writes amazing stories and has skills I only fantasize about. I write a blog that started as a promotion for my business but turned into something more personal and revelatory. We both write all the time.

Until recently, we never talked about the fact that we both write. We were raised in a family of three girls, twins, and a younger one less than two years later. In our house there was never enough attention for any of us so we hoarded our individuality, keeping our secret skills and passions away from each other for fear that they would be taken over by one of the other sisters.

It is only in hindsight that I can see how gripping so tightly to our individual, very separate identities kept us from really knowing each other on a deeper level. It’s been a gift to get to know my sisters for who they are in adulthood. Now that we are no longer doing backflips for attention, we can simply become ourselves.

I am one of the twins, the eldest by thirteen minutes. Recently my younger writer sister Amy and I collaborated on a video project for our mother who was turning eighty. As the younger sister, Amy has the curse of not being taken as seriously. I have no idea what it feels like to be in Amy’s role, but I do know that as the slightly eldest, I was often in the position of ignoring Amy’s ideas simply because she was the youngest and I was the oldest.

It was Amy’s idea to get birthday messages from people spanning my mother’s long life history. When she shared her plan with me I immediately loved it. I asked her how I could help and she was totally open to doing it together. That was the first step.

We started early, in October, for her January birthday. Amy was in charge of sleuthing out long-lost friends and contacting them. It was my job to piece together the clips and make them into a video for Mom.

During those three months working together Amy and I, who live in different cities and different time zones, talked several times a day. We FaceTimed and screen shared. We sent files back and forth multiple times. At one point my computer crashed and we had to start from scratch. Amy had to contact several people to resend their video clips and I had to borrow a computer to complete the project. In the end, there were over eighty-five individual birthday messages in a nearly hour-long extended birthday message for our mother. Our collaboration was a major success.

In the process of doing this video project, Amy and I learned that we work really well together. We had so much fun bantering in the way only sisters can. And we fell naturally into our roles using our specific strengths together toward a common goal.

In the process of creating this video project, Amy and I began to talk about our writing. We both write on Medium and a few other platforms and, though we’d each been doing it for years, we had never discussed it. We had never even read each other’s writing. 

We write very different things. Amy is wildly funny and creative. I am more contemplative and proccess-y. And, we are both write like the other sometimes. We started reading each other’s writing, then praising each other’s writing, then talking about how to support and promote each other’s writing. 

Had we been teenagers, we might have been talking about forming a girl band or a funny t-shirt business. We were so psyched, so pumped to be doing this thing writing thing together. We’ve continued to talk every day, sometimes multiple times. We’ve crossed over from the way we used to be. We no longer guard our specialness like when we were kids.

We didn’t see each other when we were younger. We couldn’t see each other’s strengths as assets. We saw them as threats to our own success in being recognized in our attention-deprived universe. As our individual universes have expanded, we’ve all found a place to call home. We’ve each found ways to be who we are and not feel threatened by the others.

What we missed when we were young was the opportunity to unite our strengths and create something bigger, better, and more beautiful. We never did form the girl band (even though we created wicked harmonies in our kitchen with wooden spoons). We never created a cottage industry during summer breaks from college. We could have. I was business-minded, Amy is amazingly creative, and Katherine can network like nobody’s business. We would have been a raging success at anything we poured our collective strengths into.

We missed out then, but my experience with Amy recently gave me a taste of what’s possible. Sisters are a unique species. There is deep love but often intense competition leaning into disdain. When sister energy is channeled in harmony, something beautiful emerges. When it moves in opposition to another sister’s energy, it becomes discordant, unpleasant, even unbearable.

After all of these years going against each other, fighting to be known for our individual specialness, we found an experience where we channeled our strengths into the same jet stream and created sister magic. 

We talked about it recently, how the video project opened up this opportunity to share something and not see it as competing for attention. It feels good, to have this kind of sisterhood where we support one another, egg each other on, and celebrate each other. It’s true what they say, “sisterhood is powerful.” The road to get there might be long, or rocky, or circuitous, but once you’re there you can feel the shift. It feels powerful.

My sister Amy and talk about doing another project together, some kind of writing. We don’t know what it will look like yet. It doesn’t really matter. It just feels good to working together, in harmony.

"Can You Fix Her?": How to be the asshole mother of the year

Yesterday was a snow day. Where I live snow is a rarity. At its coldest, the temperature in the winter is in the high thirties and low forties. It snows maybe once a year, enough for outdoor snow play every two or three years.

Yesterday was a gift from the gods, an outdoor winter wonderland. In our neighborhood, a super hilly enclave bordering a lake, it was as if we’d been transported to a sledding village in the Alps. Everyone in the neighborhood came out in their colorful snow gear. People were sledding, cross country skiing, snowshoeing. Dogs were bounding down the hills and into the mounds of snow.

I’m a planner and a worrier, so even in exciting times when there’s something to look forward to, like sledding, I start overplanning which leads me to overthinking, and eventually worrying. As I thought out the day I started to worry about how my sixteen-year-old daughter could enjoy this. When she came upstairs and saw the snow she was happy and excited, but as the prospects of sledding with her parents clarified as her only option, she became increasingly sullen.

There were a few things going on. First, she wasn’t actually that into the idea of sledding. Second, as an only child times like this are hard. There’s no built-in playmate and hanging with your parents is just not that fun. Third, I was projecting all of my expectations onto her and completely missed every single one of her cues.

I managed to organize some of our family friends to drive over to our house to sled. They have a teenage daughter as well. I checked that off my box. Only child problem- CHECK. Then there was the issue of Lucia not really being into sledding. I nagged and cajoled and manipulated Lucia until she actually came outside to meet the family friends. Getting her to sled — CHECK. 

We walked up to the top of our hill to sled down another side street where we met a friend of ours. She had been sledding by herself all morning. She’s a family friend as well and has no kids. Sometimes she’s good at relating to teens. Lucia was sitting on the sidewalk, her silence and facial expression clearly telling me that she was unhappy. My friend asked me what was wrong with her and I said, “I don’t know. Can you fix her?” And then I jumped in the sled and went down the hill.

I meant my comment about fixing Lucia to be tongue and cheek but the truth is I was really desperate (projecting) for Lucia to be enjoying the snow the way I thought she should. When I got up the hill I saw my friend sitting next to Lucia. I walked over and Lucia looked at me, glared really, and said, “Fix me. Really Mom?” And then she walked down the hill to our house.

My partner Nancy, a much less overbearing parent, said, “Laura, you have to back off. She’s in a bad mood. Just let her be.” This is not an uncommon experience in our family. As a parent, I become consumed with an outcome (like Lucia having fun sledding like a Norman Rockwell painting), go to any means necessary to achieve said outcome, and completely ignoring all of the messages my daughter is giving me, end up in a pool of regret over my misguided ways. 

Nancy and I talked about what to do. “Just go down and apologize and then give her some space. Keep it simple.” I walked down the hill. Lucia was sitting in an Adirondack chair on the patio under our back deck scrolling through her phone. Lumbering through the foot of snow to reach her, I met her sad-angry eyes. When I got to the patio I said, “Lucia, I’m sorry.” 

“Mom, why do you do that? You nag and text and can’t you just let me be in a bad mood.”

“I’m sorry,” I said again, “I’m really sorry. We’re going over to the big hill. Meet us there if you want. “I’m really sorry Lucia.”

I didn’t go into all the ways I was sorry because they didn’t really matter. The fact that I’d spent the morning trying to control her experience like a puppeteer was evident all over the place. What she really needed in that moment was just to know that I finally saw her. 

Lucia eventually walked over and joined us. I gave her a wide berth for the rest of the afternoon but my hideous words, “Can you fix her?” pinged around in my brain like a pinball all day. What I’d wanted on the surface was for Lucia to have fun, to celebrate the snow with us. But the deeper sentiment, the one I’m not proud of and that I want to change for the future, was my need for her to be a certain way. 

I wanted my daughter to fit into a mold that would make my Norman Rockwell painting complete. And in doing so I made her feel incomplete, unseen, and misunderstood. My intention to create a big happy family playing in the snow backfired and I became an asshole. I regret that Lucia heard my comment. I made her feel exactly the opposite of how I wanted her to feel.

It’s snowing again today. The streets are closed and I imagine people will be sledding. I’m not sure what our family plans will be, but I’m going to try not to be an asshole.

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.

Working with Available Light

The candle I light when I meditate is in an old ball jar. When I am done meditating I put the lid on the jar and watch the flame slowly die. It takes a few seconds. The flame lives with the oxygen left in the jar and when it no longer has enough to stay lit it goes out completely.

Relationships are like candles-- they only survive with enough oxygen to stay ignited. Whether it is a family relationship, a romantic relationship, a sibling relationship, or a simple friendship, we can feel when there is light, activity, energy. And we can feel it when there's not.

In my nuclear family of three, when everyone feels good about themselves, when we are able to each be present, it feels light and full of energy. We bring together our flames and unite them. We linger at the dinner table, laugh a lot,  and have extended conversations. There is more light, more energy, and more joy. In times when we are all fully present, it feels like all of our individual flames are lit and together they burn brighter.

In my relationship with one of my sisters, I feel like there is not enough oxygen to keep my candle steadily burning when we talk. I can feel vibrant, alive and full of life before calling her and then when I get her on the phone it feels like the fire slowly dies. 

This sister is very busy, always busy. Often I'll call her and get a robotext back: "working" or "in a meeting." I know it's probably not personal but I often take it that way. I recognize that when I do finally talk to her on the phone I am bringing with me a sense of anticipatory oxygen deprivation. 

I'm so exhausted and disappointed from receiving the endless text rejections that I come into the experience of actually talking to her feeling like an asthmatic without an inhaler. My flame is barely lit, a flicker at best. We do our best to have periodic conversations, working with the available light from our flames. But it's hard. It's a struggle. It's light a candle struggling for enough oxygen to stay lit.

I imagine this sister feels the same way about me. Just as I struggle to stay lit with her, I am not the oxygen that feeds her flame. Together we are unable to create the heat and excitement that comes when I talk to a different sibling or my partner or my best friend. 

Last night my sixteen-year-old daughter Lucia FaceTimed my sister. When I went into Lucia's room I could see her laughing and animated with my sister on the screen, also laughing and animated. I felt a pang, a sadness, a loss. My sister didn't ignite this way with me. 

It made me think about my part in this snuffed candle relationship. I am not showing up with radiant energy, flame burning, lid open, welcoming a steady flow of oxygen. I am preemptively extinguished, lid sealed tight, preparing for what I think I will experience on the phone with my sister. My daughter has fresh eyes, an open mind. She does not come into her conversations with my sister saddled with fifty years of sibling dynamics, disappointments, and expectations. 

So of course my sister was lit up. Of course, Lucia was lit up. Together they were fireworks! 

I miss this sister a lot. I long to have the kind of conversations I have with my other siblings. I long to laugh with her the way she laughs with my daughter. There is a flicker of light in our relationship, if only that I want to make it stronger, brighter. I can work with that. I can work with the available light we have and build on it.  

If I want a relationship with more energy and light with my sister, I have to see her with new eyes. I have to release the oxygen-deprived expectations I put on her. I can't control what she does, but I can try to see her through a fresh lens and hope that this brings a little more oxygen to our flickering flame. 

Learning Forgiveness from A Dog

Last night at three o'clock in the morning my dog Freckles bit me. He is a small dog, about twenty-five pounds, short and very round. He had made his way up to my pillow and when I moved I accidentally rolled over him. He bit me hard on the arm and then made his way off the bed and downstairs. The bite hurt. He broke the skin a little bit and today I have a good size bruise where he got me.

After he bit me I felt bad, like I must have hurt him. I went downstairs to check on him and he seemed just fine. He was chipper and ready for a midnight snack. I went back upstairs and tried to get a little more sleep before my 6 am alarm. When I did get up and go to the living room to meditate a few hours later, Freckles joined me. He snuggled his fat back right up to my leg on the floor and sat with me for forty-five minutes.

I thought it strange that he was so comfortable cuddling up with me after inflicting a flesh wound just three hours earlier. But he was oblivious, happy to be sitting there with me, snoring away. In the moment right after Freckles bit me I was mad at him. I was coursing with adrenaline but the anger lasted just as long as it took for my heart rate to slow down. My forgiveness was immediate and complete.

If I get mad at my partner or my sister or my mother, I want them to know that I am mad. I can't let it go until I feel they've learned a lesson, that they understand the impact of their actions. I expect a little bit of remorse, maybe some penance.

I want them to be a little stand-off-ish, tentative to approach me. This will signify that they understand the errors of their ways. But with Freckles I didn't have that anger. I became almost immediately concerned about him. What had made him bite me? Was it his arthritic hips or did I bend his tail the wrong way?

And then, just hours later, Freckles approached me as if nothing had happened. He wasn't shy or unsure about smooshing up for some love this morning. He had no memory of what had happened. His memory was of the unconditionality of our relationship. The bite a few hours earlier was a vague and distant occurrence. Odds are that Freckles didn't remember it at all. He was ready to move on and get more love.

Humans make each other's lives so much harder by holding onto memories. I have a friend whose partner keeps track of times when she is hurt by her in a journal. It's like the holy grail of hurt and it's a sure way to stay mad and distant. We hold onto our memories of being hurt because we want to protect ourselves from being hurt in the future. But gripping tight to the hurt just prolongs the hurt while forgiving lets the love in.

What if we thought a little more deeply about what might have motivated a snapping voice, a thoughtless response, or an inpatient honk on the horn from our partner or parent, or sibling? What if we looked at the times when we are mad or hurt from a different angle? Like I looked at Freckles after he bit me when I thought, "What kind of pain is this sweet dog experiencing that would make him bite me?" 

What if I made space for my partner Nancy to snap at me because maybe she had a shitty day and then I just forgave her as quickly as I forgave Freckles?

And what if we weren't afraid to approach the ones we love after we've angered them? What if we invited forgiveness sooner, more immediately so that the memory of the hurt moved into the past instead of occupying real-time emotional energy? It would be so great to bound up to Nancy after hurting her feelings and giving her a great big hug, not from a place of "please forgive me" but from a place of unconditional love.

Dogs are different from humans. Their ability to conceptualize emotions and intellect is much less evolved, but they have something to teach us. The unconditional and uncomplicated love that exists between me and Freckles reminds me that this can exist with me and the other intimate relationships in my life as well. I have to be willing to forgive when I am hurt and to lean in to love when I've been unkind. 

It only seems hard to do this because I've become habituated to driving such a complex superhighway of emotions with the ones I love. It sounds nice though, to simplify things. People I love get mad, they get hurt, they bite. But they still love me. What a wonderful world it would be if, instead of lingering, evolving into a different more complicated story, forgiveness came right after the bite. What if I cut out all the drama in between the hurt and the endpoint of forgiveness?

I imagine how much lighter I would feel if I could operate from a place of trusting that even when I act out, piss off people I love, misbehave, or show my worst self, I am still loved. Freckles is that way. He bit me but that didn't change his love for me or his expectation that I would still love him. And I forgave Freckles within just a few minutes. The end result was that we were both free to settle back into the pure experience of unconditional love. If only humans could do that with each other.