love

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There is Room In Our Wanting Selves

Having another child born, our hearts somehow open up and make more love, more space where things once seemed crowed up like hobos in a boxcar.  Our time and energy does that too.  Feeling like you can’t do another thing by 6 PM?  Feeling like watching TV on the couch is an accomplishment at that point?  I’m telling you that this changes.  Do what you want.  You may not realize it yet but you want something special.  You want something that you were designed to do.   When you discover what that is, activity becomes joyful, congruent with your inner self.  Somehow there is more room in your day.  More energy that comes with no strings attached.

My husband just came home from a tech conference.  He was told by famous Silicon Valley junkies, while sitting in an audience of other wannabe’s, “Don’t do a startup.  You’ll fail.”  It was a secondary message that returned intermittently – unless you can’t sleep at night because you need to solve a problem – if you are trying to do a startup company for any other reason than for your own sanity, you won’t make it.  These people were doing what they were doing because they felt like it was their life’s nectar.  It was their pearl of great price.  Their efforts were fueled by their own genetic design.

In medical school, I used to look around me confused by the obvious natural positive responses of other students.  I looked at myself and thought I was a fake.

I looked at them and thought, “There’s the real thing.  I wonder what it feels to be the real thing.”  I know.  Sad huh?  Ah well.  Turns out I’m a flaming extrovert.  I get energy from being with people.  Being alone takes energy from me.  Wether it happens slowly or quickly, either way eventually I have to resurface and connect with someone to re-tank.  Every day when I sat down to study, I felt alone, energy sucked out of me, the ground was going to swallow me up.  And I did it still.  Ground through my long hours long enough to make it to where I belonged.  With you in psychiatry :).

Here’s the news.  We are all “The real thing!”  Yah!  We have our own greatness.

I’m not talking about opportunity to reach that greatness.  Some of that we are given and some of that we make.  I’m just ringing our bells with the idea.  If you want to read more about this, read the blog posts on temperaments.

Question:  Are you doing what you want?  Please tell me your story.

Self Care Tip #64 – There is room in your wanting self for more.  Be a friend to yourself.

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Criticize if You Love Me.

On the receiving end of criticism.  Different from playing football or tag, no one wants to be chased, i.e. criticized.  If given the choice, which would you choose?  Chase vs. flee?  Humans can be a bit predatory when it comes to offering up feedback.

However, what I’m talking about has nothing to do with abuse.  Verbal emotional abuse is about unequal power.  Abuse of any kind, including spoken abuse, is scary, painful and shameful.

What I’m talking about is simply criticism.  You mismanage something at work and your boss, corrects you.  After coming home from that, tired and feeling beaten up, your children are picking on each other.  Then you get them in bed and find that you forgot to write-up a report and it has to be done.  Your spouse tells you that he misses his time with you.  

It takes a lot of love to deal with something.  Turns out, it’s much easier to let it go.  Walk away.  Examples of trying to promote criticism are the advertisements targeting parents to tell their kids not to use drugs.  It takes love to say no.  Loving yourself as well as love for someone else.  Kids who don’t get this feel neglected and confused.  Adults can also feel lost in so much impersonal space and act out just to get noticed.  Some people might call this “gamey.”  I just call it normal.  It’s a normal instinct to want the boundaries of someone who cares pressing around you.  It’s normal to feel adrift without knowing that you are worth somebody’s bother.

I say,

spare the rod and spoil the child

…at all levels.  At any age or station.  And further more, with your self-to-self included.  If you love yourself, you end up wanting to do and be better.  Coming from any direction, we can take it when we know we are loved.

The best part of Proverbs 12:24 is the second half,

but he who loves him is careful to discipline him.

So now, if given the choice, which would you choose?

Self Care Tip #56 – Bring it!  Take it!  Give it!  You are loved.  Be a friend to yourself.

Question:  Have you been criticized and known you were loved?  What’s your story?

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Take What is Yours

It doesn’t have to be that complicated.  “I only go two places.  The tattoo parlor to hang out with my buddies or the beach.”  He says he doesn’t have a cell phone or a computer.  I see him every week with his wife, doing what he can to support her as she teaches a class for my 3-year-old. He smiles and chortles and pokes with satire.  He has shown me his skin art several times and it is easy to see what these represent.  The people he loves and who love him.

In the film written and directed by Derrick Borte, “The Joneses,” we watch a pseudo-family move into a gorgeous home with intent to market their wares to the unsuspecting towns-folk.  As they are instruments in sales, they become infected with purchasing-power-fever.  As their own fantasies grow of being the perfect family unit, so does the definition of what it takes to be one.  Being happy individually as well as relationally equals easy access to riches and easy life.  The glitch is that they are not a family nor does the new this or that belong to any of them.  Like making a deal with Ursula the purple octopus-witch, they are ensnared.  It becomes a hard choice to regain the rights to their lives.  In the end, they barely escape with the understanding of what they can really claim as their own – love.

The other day when our dog was dyeing, at bedtime I was able to debrief with our daughter about her feelings.  “I know you love me Mommy but it felt like you loved Maggie more than me.  Even though I knew you loved me more, I didn’t feel it Mommy.”  For someone who can barely see around her Ego, that’s pretty amazing!  From her beautiful child-self, she told us that love is there even when we don’t feel it.

My husband was telling me his “Good News,” quite different from  rights of passage like a fraternity.  It is that God is already right here with each of us and unrelated to our performance.  We all have Love, regardless of lost opportunities, low-character, higher learning, or technology.

It’s not that complicated.

Self Care Tip #51 –  Take what is yours.  Be a friend to yourself.

Question:  Agree or disagree?  What do you think?  Please tell me your story.

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Journey

“Mumford, The screenplay by Lawrence Kasdan, describes Henry Follet, a man who is living in his fantasies.  The superior problem isn’t that he’s living in his fantasies however.  It is that he has never been a character in them.  They only included other people.  At some point he gets more connected to his own journey, which is when he started appearing in his fantasies.  Or one could say his fantasies became his reality.

Connecting to our journey is multidirectional.  It includes the folding and opening of time.  Someone asked me why I started this blog.  I told him one of the reasons is that so much of what made me who I am was shelved when I went to medical school and then had children.  Time is folding for me when I write now, connecting me here to where this writing-self was last seen then.

When avoiding crucial work, it is as if a broken person’s bits of self are walking their different directions.  There is a divorce and the kids….  What does the father do?  Five years later he is still trying to get the courage to ask them to love him again.  Relapsing negative relationships, and she found herself again with someone abusive.  Overweight, and still buying and bringing binge-foods home.

As Will Rogers said,

When you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging.

Lately I’ve enjoyed my journey more since I stopped breaking traffic laws.  Exhale.  Now I can relax when I’m driving and think, pray, listen to podcasts, be with myself.

Immaterial things like our hopes can both connect us and disconnect us.  When a thought like, “I wish I did…” comes, when employment is more a job than an interest, when anger flares often – look at times like this as opportunities to find your path.  I found that this yearning in me was really a portal for my fantasies to come through and join me.

Self Care Tip #29 – Take your opportunity.  Be a friend to yourself.

Related Articles
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Trust What is Inherent

Does loving and liking go together? Not always. I like to think of loving as a constant not entirely dependent on us. Thank goodness!

Waiting to like someone is like waiting to go to the gym until you’re in shape. Or, not getting to know God until you are a good person.

This morning I woke up to the sound of dishes and quiet excited little voices. There was a vibe of energy in the air. My eyes were still blurry and crusty and my mind in a haze of, “What’s happening here?”

Some mornings I wake up to the anxiety of hearing other sounds. Someone wasn’t being nice to someone else. Wondering if I was going to have that job for the rest of the day of refereeing and…. Some mornings I am afraid. Some mornings when I wake up, they know I don’t like them. Because we love each other so, it just hurts all of us.

But today I couldn’t believe it. The kids had folded and put away the laundry and were unloading the dishes! Before I woke up!

Why? They knew the deal. No going to their friend’s house to bake cake until finishing all their chores. So, their motives weren’t all lined up right. They didn’t do it out of largeness. Nor did they do it for me. After licking that wound, I jumped up and down and whooped for them!

We don’t wait to go to school until we have knowledge. That’s the point of school.
God doesn’t care why you go to Him, he just wants you there. He’ll take care of our motives.
We don’t keep off the game field until we already know how to play.

  • …We all get it.

    With my children, I’m hoping some of how I felt was noticed by them. Maybe they’ll remember some of how they felt. There was a joy in the house that a time-out just doesn’t invoke.

    Moving back to loving and liking, well, they don’t always go together either. The inherent goodness in something like that is responsible for drawing forth the other. The same force I’m counting on to move in my children. The same force I’m counting on for me when I wake up scared. When we trust that force, we’re more able to be present with what is already around us. We can say, “This is enough,” without giving up on what we still hope for.

    Self Care tip #20 – Trust what is inherent. Be a friend to yourself.

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    My Essence – A Matter of Love

    Betrayal?

    Connecting that behaviors are linked to brain health is often confusing. The distance traveled to reach that point may have been long. It may have involved experiences painful to themselves and their loved ones.

    For example, they may have lost a job because they couldn’t get out of bed in the morning. A divorce might have come after changing into someone irritable and angry. A trucker might no longer be able to drive on the freeway because of panic. But once they connect that this change in personality relates to a change in their brain health, how do they feel about that?

    Some people feel relief. That they didn’t personally fail. That they aren’t a bad Christian. That it wasn’t because they didn’t try hard enough to “feel good,” to stop itching, to get up and do something with their life, to quit gambling, etc… Maybe they feel for a moment that judgment can be suspended for them.

    However there is a group of people, maybe overlapping these, who feel betrayed. Betrayed by their very essence. The question of, if they can’t trust themselves, what is real in life at all? They struggle with the shame of betraying their own person. “Who am I if I’m not…?” and the questions roll on. It must be a question for all of us with changing bodies, Who are you if your mind gets sick?

    There is the temporal line of thought, that if your brain changes, your memories, your personality, than you change. Your human form is different. Like getting your arm cut off, you have to grieve and grow a new picture of how you see yourself. A changing person through the span of life. This is in fact healthy adaptation.

    There is also a thread in this weave of believing that our essence isn’t wholly related to our changing bodies. That somehow when the various curtains of life fall and open and the final curtain comes around, that this bit remains. I don’t think you can believe this unless you believe in a Love which is stronger than death.

    Love is stronger than the death of my neurons, my dendritic connections, stronger than the death of my mind.

    The adaptability needed for this life is a no-brainer. We can’t survive if we don’t. It takes courage to adapt when your person is changing. It takes courage when you are loosing yourself. Such courage, like someone in war or flight or determined movement that others could only imagine.

    But how you define your essence also matters. I see it as a related step, but also apart from these excellent coping skills. I see it as a matter of Love. It’s win-win when Love weaves through you.

    Self Care Tip #16 – Choose Love. Be a friend to yourself.

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    Use your intuition. Love.

    Taking care of yourself is more than a list of to-do’s. It’s more than getting good sleep. It’s more than eating well, and exercising and not judging yourself. Taking care of yourself is more than growing in knowledge or producing. Sometimes doing all these things we can still feel very uncared for.

    When we reduce and tease apart the workings of our minds, when we hold the threads of what we thought made us up, we realize that our essence is not in hand. That essence being love. To love yourself comes when you know you were loved 1st by someone else. Everyone has been. Even the most unfortunate. Not everyone knows that but that doesn’t make it disappear.

    Work simultaneously with that love, and these other efforts of roadblocks, biological and behavioral therapies – the character threads that we isolate and nurture then will weave together into someone friendly.

    I feel comfortable saying that that someone who loved me and you 1st is God, but that can be confusing to people. I don’t think of world religions when I think of God. I think of all that I see that is good, like stars who’s light reaches me from thousands of years away, or my son’s smile right beside me. I think of the witness-mother of her murdered daughter who found forgiveness.

    When I think of love, I think about a wanting in me. Someone asked me, “Why believe in God?” My answer is my own as is yours. I believe in God not because of what He will do for me but because I want to share every bit of life with love. I’m comfortable believing that is who God is. But don’t be afraid of being confused.

    Madeleine L’Engle wrote in a Wrinkle In Time:

    “Don’t try to comprehend with your mind. Your minds are very limited. Use your intuition.”

    Intuition if nothing else tells us that there is love. It’s like the melody in music, love. Without it, we are nothing but clanging sounds.

    Self Care Tip #8 – Love. Be a friend to yourself.