#365Gratitude: Jars & Boxes

We picked up the keys to our new house Wednesday night.  It's been a difficult time, lots of moving parts and pieces to juggle. I was so grateful we got this house, and so excited to pick up the keys that I made sure the very first thing I moved into the house was my Gratitude Jar. 

There it is! 

My gratitude jar is a ceramic jar I made (well, painted). Every so often that I feel spontaneously grateful for, and I'll dash off a little note about it, and stick it in the jar.

​Putting the jar in my house, let me drop a sort of arbitrary line in the sand. Now I really live there.

Well, almost.

Boxes, and tigers, and furniture, oh my

I just have to move these many many boxes, and our furniture, and our cats, and our home network, and our utilities, and every other little thing I haven't thought of yet.

But it's okay.  Because life is filled with these sorts of arbitrary crossroads. Yes, I'm moving, but I'm also, you know, still moving.

#365Gratitude: Pandora's Box (and well spanked ass) are in your face again.

Pandora Blake

So there's a British pornographer whose career, aesthetic, work, and drive I really admire, Pandora Blake (NSFW link).  She ran (past tense) the very lovely website DreamsOfSpanking.com.

There's this evil, patriarchal, boundary-overstepping British regulatory agency, ATVOD, that passed a law/regulation/encyclical/evil-scroll-of-doom banning all sorts of pornography, back in late 2014.  Here's a relevant quote from an article from the British newspaper/blog The Independent.

The Audio Visual Media Services regulations (AVMS) banned sex acts that were deemed morally damaging or life-threatening, including strangulation, face-sitting and fisting. Spanking beyond what was deemed to be a gentle level, humiliation, full bondage and restraint (which involves a gag and all four limbs), female ejaculation, and depictions of non-consensual sex were also forbidden under the laws enforced by the Authority for Television on Demand (Atvod), which has since been overtaken by Ofcom.

(The boldfacing and italicizing are mine.)

What a load of sex-negative, woman-hating trash!  Female ejaculation is morally damaging and life threatening?! 

I was outraged, as were many.  There was a protest, a face-sitting sit-in in front of a government building.

Pandora wasn't going to take this sitting down.  (Pun intended.)  She protested.  She rallied.  She went on British mainstream news programs to discuss it.  She mounted a legal defense, and would not be silenced.

And you know what?  She won.

Ofcom, the British Office of Communications ruled that the law didn't apply to her site at all, and that the ATVOD overstepped their bounds.  Ofcom in fact has completely taken over that sort of regulatory work from ATVOD, effectively shutting the agency down.

Sometimes, the good guys win.  

WAY TO GO PANDORA!

#365Gratitude: I (mostly) shut myself up

So, a friend of mine posted this pic today:

(Looks like Darryl from the Walking Dead.  It's a bearded, dirty looking man, in a forest, standing with his face upturned, eyes closed, sunshine on his face.  Caption: "I CAN'T WAIT FOR THE DAY... THAT PEOPLE ENJOY LIFE AND STOP BITCHING ABOUT EVERYTHING.")

My knee-jerk reaction, which I at first followed, was to leave a comment.  "Don't you see that this is just more bitching? How about you just enjoy your own life and don't worry about other people's bitching?" 

Not a split second later, I realized I was doing it too, by leaving the comment.

So, I started to add to the comment, that it was super funny how I got caught in the self-sustaining bitching whirlpool of it all.

Then, a few seconds into that, realized the ludicrous nature of even that, and deleted the whole thing.  

Alright then, great - why am I writing about it here then?!  

Stick with me, this is a pretty big gratitude, and potent enough to stop me in my tracks, and get me to actually write a gratitude post, which to be honest, I've been too fried and busy to keep up doing lately.

In the space of that two to three minutes between see stimulus, deliver  automatic response, edit it, rescind it utterly, and lastly achieve mindful silence, is one of the practices that I work really, really hard to cultivate within myself.  It's a constant fight, endless work, but so very worthwhile.

I'm struggling to name for you exactly what the practice is.  Perhaps it's called emotional hygiene.  

It's so easy to get caught up in attachments, in shenpa.  That particular meme is an example of the anger shenpa, which is an expression of outrage about anything in one's life.  It can be inward focused or based on something outside oneself, about another, or life in general.

Examples:

Here are some nice juicy inner ones that I have been hooked with lately: 

"Why am I so fucking fat?  I hate that.  Once I'm thinner, eating right and working out again I'll be happy."
"I better start writing again.  I can't stand it when I don't write."
"I hate when I feel like I treat my partners like sexual gratification ATM's.  I'm going to alienate them if I don't get that under wraps."
"I better get all the various things related to moving from my old house to my new house right, so I don't cause myself a giant financial disaster."

And now for a bunch of saucy outer examples:

"Why are people such goddamn sheep, ready to be angry at whatever everyone else is angry about?"
"Why do so many overly religious people not see how they use their religion to fuck up the lives of other people?"
"Why is social media such a cesspool of group think, vanity, and human ugliness?"
"I wish (estranged relative) would just not be such an intolerant asshole so I could do something about being estranged from them."

 The thing I did when I deleted my comment to the picture above was something I learned about from Pema Chödrön in Getting Unstuck.  I caught myself swept up in reaction and mindlessness and then consciously made the decision to stay.  What I mean is, to stay with the feelings I felt, ride them like a rough current on a river, and see them through before acting.  I realized that the little electric zing of unhappiness and snarky response I was feeling to the picture came from me.  Then I realized that even the attempt to point it out was that same feeling, just misdirected a bit.  

"When you think everything is someone else's fault, you will suffer a lot.  When you realize that everything springs only from yourself, you will learn both peace and joy. -- Dalai Lama"

I was making myself feel the snark and unease.  It was me.  This is like 300 level zen thinking.  Sometimes it rains.  Sometimes that rain is an absolutely torrential downpour.  And you don't have to stand in it, getting wet.  You can go inside, put up an umbrella, bust out the super serious grade rain gear, whatever.  You have tons of choices.  You can't change that it's raining.  That's what's happening.  But you can observe your own emotional hygiene, and not get sucked into a cycle of action-reaction.  

That doesn't mean you don't get upset, angry, fearful, disappointed.  That does happen.  It's like the rain.  You can't selectively shut off your emotional response.  It's part of being alive.  But once the emotion happens, you do have the chance to mindfully observe it, and decide what to do with it.  That's what the Dalai Lama was talking about, and that's what Pema meant by staying.  

There's a verse in the Tao te Ching that speaks exactly to this, which I think I understand just a bit better today than I ever have before.  This one:

56

Those who know don't talk.
Those who talk don't know.

Close your mouth,
block off your senses,
blunt your sharpness,
untie your knots,
soften your glare,
settle your dust.
This is the primal identity.

Be like the Tao.
It can't be approached or withdrawn from,
benefited or harmed,
honored or brought into disgrace.
It gives itself up continually.
That is why it endures.

Closing my mouth, blocking my senses, blunting my sharpness, untying my knots, softening my glare, settling my dust - these are all staying.  I give up, for now.  I'm grateful that I can.

#365Gratitude: Healthy Habits, No Trout About It

This morning I'm at the gym getting ready to go swimming. It's been a while since I wrote a gratitude post. I've been dealing with the stress of finding a new house.  

Thankfully, the worst part of that process is over. We've found and been approved for a new home.  

In the midst of all this stress I've been barely working out at all, and eating horrendously.  It's caused me to gain weight and feel awful.  

But this morning, I'm back at it. I ate a small breakfast on my way to the gym, and spent the drive thinking about self-care. 

Over the past few weeks, I've had to say no's to some folks over a variety of things. I actually feel really good about this.  Knowing one's own boundaries, having a sense of self, is really important. 

Taking care of oneself, practicing self-care, does not make you selfish.  It's not just okay to take care of oneself, it actually helps you in your efforts to do the best you can for others. 

I'm grateful that I know how to take care of myself, so I can make good choices around my ability to help others too.  

#365Gratitude: Execution of stay

Yesterday, I got some bad news.

A house we were looking to rent got snatched out from under us.  For whatever reason, the landlord decided to go with someone else.  That's the second time this has happened to me in the past two months.  

I found out while I was at work.  It was like having a bomb dropped on my head.  

For a few hours, I was pretty useless.  I bitched to my family, bitched to our realtor, put in inquiries on several other houses.  I felt my stomach turn into a pot of cold ball bearings, grease, and pieces of glass.  My heart thumped in my chest like someone was punching me from the inside.

This is pretty natural.  It's reaction.  A thing happens, I react.  Just like everyone else.

Then I got my shit together.  Which is to say, I stopped trying to get my shit together, and just got back to doing what I was working on when the bad news bomb first went off.  I had this technical problem I was working through, trying to assemble some data into the appropriate javascript structure to use with a jQuery plugin.  I fiddled and fussed and made progress.

Earlier in the day, I had contemplated going home, I felt so paralyzed with anger, worry, and fear.  But I ended up staying late, my nose buried deep in the code.  I didn't finish what I was doing, but I made great strides.  It felt good.

What I was doing, that whole time, was staying.

This is something I learned about from Pema Chödrön, in her book/audio lecture Getting Unstuck.  Our whole lives we're taught to run from suffering, that discomfort and pain are just not to be allowed in any way.  It's bullshit.  We expend more energy running away from feeling something bad than just outright feeling it.  Instead, you can lean into the pain, really take a good damn look at it, feel it, and move through it.

At 1:30 I was having chest pains.  At 3:30 my girlfriend Squee messaged me to check on me and I told her I was "not great, having trouble thinking, and leaving at 4:30".  At 4:30 I had started to make progress, and was deep in my code.  I didn't leave until six.

At one point, I told her how I'd started to get my code to work, and then observed, "staying is powerful. Crazy powerful."  I told her about what I had experienced staying:

You don't do it. It's done.
If you do it, you're just trying to do it.
If it's done, it happened.

Which I added, is the sort of crazymaking batshit talk that drives people bananas about zen stuff.

After my commute, I had another episode of expectation fever, which again, is normal.  Sadly, I made bad food choices (I really didn't need two bowls of cereal after my initial small dinner.  But my samsarra got out of control, and I tried to comfort eat.  Go me!) I got lost for a while in my bad feelings, again.  

Then I remembered to stay, again.  

You know when this lesson is over?  Never.

I'm grateful for it.