life – Falling Awake to Life – Through Story, Myth and Mindfulness

WAKING UP – SELFISHNESS

Recently I had an email exchange which went like this. The email was from my immediate neighbour:

Hi,

Do you 0rder on Ama z0n ?

Take care, love, Jan & Teddy xxx

I replied

Hi Jan,

I try to avoid it but I do occasionally.  What are your concerns?

take care

Susie x

The email came back…

Glad to hear back from you, I've been trying to purchase a £300 Airbnb email gift card on Amazon for my niece whose birthday is today, unfortunately she is down with stage 4 mesothelioma cancer, She had lost both parents to the disease (COVID-19. and I'd promised to get the gift card for her today but I have not been able to do that because my bank said they were having issues charging my card and would take a couple of days to get it sorted, Please can you help me get this done from your end, I'll reimburse you back as soon as possible, Let me know so I can send you her email address and the link to purchase the gift cards.

Thanks,

Take care, love, Jan & Teddy xxx

I wonder how you respond to reading this? This is how I reacted.

The first thing I noticed was a spike of unpleasant feeling in me at the request for £300. My heart rate increased and I felt tension in my gut and jaw (very familiar). There were feelings of contraction and anxiety. And a strong desire to avoid responding at all.

The thoughts that came went a bit like this: ‘£300!’ then ‘I don’t want to do that’. Then, ‘Why aren’t I comfortable with lending Jan £300? I trust her – of course she would pay me back.’ Then, ‘I’m being selfish and unkind. Jan has told me before about friends and relatives that she cares about with cancer or other issues.’

At that point I was about to go ahead, reply and make the payment …

I paused.

And in pausing, the annoying voice inside broke through ‘What about Tim? This is his money too! You should check with him.’ Fair point. I was casual, saying ‘I’m going to do this, just checking in with you…’

Tim had, of course, only seen the first email. He said it set off alarm bells in him. For instance:

‘Why was it from Jan and Teddy. Who is Teddy? ‘

‘Teddy is her cat’, I answered, realising in that moment how odd that was.

Then,

‘Jan never sends xxx.’

‘You’re right’.

‘And the typos?’

The veil fell from my mind. It felt so peculiar! To shift so suddenly from one perspective to another. Suddenly I could see so clearly that this was a scam. Why had I not been able to see it before? Perhaps it was blindingly obvious to you.

My first reaction to this was to feel ashamed and stupid. ‘Call myself a mindfulness teacher’ etc. But I have been growing in self-compassion and that helped me become more interested in the ‘why?’ as a genuine question.

Reflecting on it, I recognised that I had interpreted the warning signs of discomfort and contraction inside me as my selfishness, instead of warnings that something was wrong with the email. Why was I doing that? I recognised an old pattern that I’d been brought with, the one that told me ‘others come first, you mustn’t be selfish.’ This is not just due to my personal childhood although I think mine was a bit intense in that regard (my mother’s was even more so). It is cultural socialisation of women. Being ‘selfish’ is generally viewed as unacceptable in a woman. We are supposed to be warm, caring and selfless. Certainly not assertive, angry or ‘selfish.’

But surely that is generally a good thing? To be taught not to be selfish.

There is a difference between being taught to share, and being taught that others come first. If we are not given equal value to other people, if their needs must come first then we are not given permission to protect ourselves.

And that makes life very, very dangerous for a woman.

I am not stupid. My body is not stupid. It was registering alarm bells but I was interpreting those alarm bells as unacceptable selfishness. And that interpretation blinded me to the blinking obvious.

Tim could see it as a scam because he was not socialised in the way I was. Waking up to this, I now realised that of course! Jan would never ask me for this kind of money over an email. She lives next door. She could just knock on the door and ask. And she is not the sort of person who would be comfortable asking anyway. I could have gone next door and checked. Or rung her.

Again, a sense of stupidity and shame started to rise up.

This is where the mindfulness practice and an unjudging husband made all the difference. Why didn’t it help me see it immediately? Mindfulness is a lifelong journey of waking up and this particular piece of indoctrination is very deep. In this moment, mindfulness practice helped me:

a) pause and make a skilful decision to check in with Tim,

b) offer myself self-compassion

c) recognise that I am not stupid

d) explore what was going on underneath and recognise that the scam appealed to a deep seam of guilt and socially indoctrinated behaviour.

Over my life span, this indoctrination of ‘selflessness’ has made it very difficult for me to be direct, to say ‘no’ when I needed to and on occasion has put me in very dangerous places. In my 20s, I felt I should give lifts in my car to hitchhikers; At university, I invited 2 strange men into a shared flat when I was returning from a party at 2am, because they said they had nowhere to stay and they asked for a cup of tea – Why did my 2 female flatmates not get furious with me after that?

That’s just 2 examples. My children are surprised that I survived.

Some women don’t.

Fortunately, the worst that could have happened in this case was the loss of £300.

………………..

Yes, it is scary how sophisticated these scams are becoming. Yes, people out there will take advantage if they can.

But it is not them that concern me as much as this female indoctrination. I had passed some of this on to my daughter without realising but fortunately she has recognised much of this. It frightens me that in raising our daughters like this we are not just leaving them undefended we are denying them the right to have any defence at all.

Women are critiqued for being self-assertive, aggressive, angry – if we are not given access to these qualities, we are permanently vulnerable. It’s as if (hmmm) we have been deliberately brought up like this so that we remain dependent on the male patriarchy to protect and defend us. That hasn’t gone well.

I imagine all of us as lopsided.

Women lopsided one way and men lopsided the other way. Men have often not been permitted to feel vulnerable, to have emotions (apparently anger isn’t an emotion!!) which means they cannot then process those feelings. That means they are in danger of harming others or harming themselves.

It also means none of us are free.

This is where non-binary people have much to offer us men/women, if we listen. Have a read of ‘None of the Above’ by Travis Alabanza. It is a gift towards liberation.

So, now, for yourself, please pause and consider…. What are the beliefs and habits that you have been brought up with? That seems so ‘true’. Are they fit for purpose? Are they stifling you? Perhaps putting you in the path of danger?

WAKE UP.

And spread the word.

NEW YEAR – LESSONS FROM A STAIRLIFT

My mother is 96 years old and still lives in her own home supported by carers and essential items like a stairlift that takes her up her old set of stairs around the corner near the top, delivering her finally at the landing. It looks like the one below.

Anyone who has ever used stairlifts knows that they are not speedy but Mum rang up a few days ago, worried, as the stairlift had gone on a ‘go slow’ on her way up to bed the previous night, even stopping at a couple of points before carrying on. She didn’t want to be left stranded half-way up the stairs as she can barely walk, let alone climb stairs.

The following morning, she and the carer (Gloria) had rung the company to get an engineer to come out. We didn’t have insurance so they needed pre-payment of the £150 call out fee first. I have financial power of attorney so I rang them up, waited for the requisite 10 minutes on the phone and was thinking of just using the website, which the automated voice kept urging me to do, when finally, a real voice came on the phone. Or at least it sounded real.

Waiting for someone to answer proved a very useful pause.

Pauses are one of the most useful things that you can do in life before making a decision. Especially mindful pauses. I don’t always remember.

In that pause I had an idea.

The voice was still rather automatic, asking my details, preparing to take payment when I asked if there was something we could actually do our end first. I hit gold. The voice lit up and became an animated and helpful person 😊. Yes, we could do something, Hurrah!

After explaining to me in detail about using a remote control, which gave me heart palpitations because I had no idea where it was and hadn’t see it for over a year, he then changed tack and it turned out we didn’t need a remote control at all.

‘There’s a panel on the stairlift which shows up a code and if something is wrong there’ll be a J3 or an E something or possible another number.’

He then went on to say that from my description it was probably a J3 problem. He explained carefully, not in techno speak but in easy, homely language (Thank you!):

‘The stairlift has to go around a corner to get up the stairs. In order to do that, it has to have a map in its system. Sometimes the map disappears and it gets lost.’

It sounded rather sweet that a stairlift could get lost.

He carried on:

‘Because it is lost, it goes very slowly because it doesn’t know where the corners are and it will sometimes stop. It can also tip slightly if it’s expecting to go round a corner.’

Why do I feel so much empathy for this stairlift?

He finishes:

‘For it to reset, it needs to go back to the top of the stairs because that is “home”. Once it is there it will beep and then reset itself.’

The stairlift just needed some help getting home. I know that feeling.

It turned out to be a team effort.

Having thanked him profusely, I then rang Gloria and we had to go through the whole procedure on the phone as I live 100 miles away. Gloria discovered that she had no idea how to use the stairlift. I know it should be easy but I’d also been stymied by it, when visiting at Christmas. It was my 96-year-old mother who was the expert here, so I waited while Gloria helped my mother out of her chair, into her wheelchair, and then over to the stairlift.

Mum’s job was to keep the stairlift moving while Gloria followed her up the stairs, watching the numbers and shouting down the phone at me

‘It’s saying A2’

‘that’s the right code, the man says’.

They got to the top and then repeated the process going down.

‘It’s saying A3’

‘That’s correct for going down.’

The stairlift had worked perfectly on both journeys. It became evident that it had reset the previous night when my mum parked it at the top. We saved £150 and it’s been fine ever since.

It just got a bit lost and it needed to get home to regain its bearings.

That is my story for the New Year, and indeed for anytime that you notice you are feeling lost and overwhelmed… (by personal stuff or world news).

Now take a moment to recognise what state you are in: Maybe you’re going slow, stopping, unsure of your bearings.

What you need to do is come home.

What a relief.

Instead of rushing out to find someone or something to fix you (often at high cost), you simply come home.

How do we come home?

You know. Listen to yourself. You have your ways.

Some of my ways of coming home are: meditation, walking in nature, especially amongst trees or by the sea. Also, poetry, music. Also taking time to cook a good meal, snuggling up with someone I love and a good book. Sometimes I need to be on my own, sometimes I need to touch base with someone else.

This morning, I was feeling lost, a minor swirl of frustration, mainly with myself. I recognised it. My reset button this morning was to go and find Tim, who hugged me and brought me home.

Below is a poem that I love. It is a deeply embodied, coming home. It is by Jane Hooper. I cannot find a book source. I quote the first part of it.

Please Come Home
by Jane Hooper

Please come home.
Please come home.
Find the place where your feet know where to walk
And follow your own trail home.

Please come home.
Please come home into your own body,
Your own vessel, your own earth.
Please come home into each and every cell,
And fully into the space that surrounds you…
Please come home.
Please come home to trusting yourself,
And your instincts and your ways and your knowings,
And even the particular quirks of your personality.
Please come home.

Please come home and once you are firmly there,
Please stay home awhile and come to a deep rest within.
Please treasure your home. Please love and embrace your home.
Please get a deep, deep sense of what it’s like to be truly home.
Please come home. Please come home.

SEEING THE WORLD THROUGH A DIFFERENT LENS

Several years ago, I caught a train for a long journey and sat on one side of a table, next to a skinny boy about 8 years old. He was sitting by the window and the two people responsible for him sat opposite. For some reason, I connected them as his carers not his parents (I never asked so I never found out). He was a wonderfully curious boy and he asked the man opposite, ‘why do we see the colours that we see? My eyes are brown so why isn’t everything brown?’ The man just smiled. The woman was more playful, ‘my eyes are green but if I saw everything as green, I’d start arguing with you!

And then because I’d been reading an article on it, I said to the lad, ‘We don’t see with our eyes, we see with our minds.’ He looked at me, wide eyed, then crunched up his face in disbelief. He ignored me after that and got caught up in some other interesting thing.

What do I mean when I’m talking about seeing? Receiving a visual image, making sense of it in terms of shape and colour and interpreting that image. Perhaps at a distance I see something brown, tubular and vertical with a green mass at the top etc and I interpret it as a ‘tree’.

What do you see below? There are at least 2 entirely different images available to you.

There’s more. While the eyes receive the visual image, the mind is deciding which images to pay attention to. We wouldn’t be able to function if we had to take in EVERYTHING we saw all the time and process it. Mark Williams, clinical psychologist and one of the founders of Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy explains how ‘even vision is a simulation’ in his book “Deeper Mindfulness” p20/21. The mind creates a virtual reality which is then updated when needed.

If you haven’t seen this video before about focussed attention, you might enjoy it. It is one of several

Our minds pick out what to ‘see’ by focussing on what is significant for us. It also colours what we see with our opinions, attitudes, and background experience. I think that lad had something. We are all seeing reality with different coloured lenses!

I may be contentious here but see how it lands:

Being objective is impossible.

How we ‘see’ a person, will inform how we respond to them and it may have very little to do with who they are.

………………………………………..

Seeing Stephen

In 2000, as part of a church group, I visited a local mental health drop-in social evening. When we arrived, I separated from the others and looked for someone to talk to. The room was crowded so what did I ‘see’ in Stephen that made me want to chat with him? In my book ‘Stephen from the Inside Out,’ I describe him as, ‘in his mid-forties, slightly taller than me with glossy black hair, alert brown eyes and a disarming chuckle.’ I still couldn’t tell you exactly what drew me to start a conversation with this total stranger. I only began to understand why I stayed in contact with him, when I began to write the book.

…………………………………

Twenty years later, I wrote a description of the flat Stephen had lived in for ten years. By then Stephen had died so could not comment. I thought I’d written an ‘objective’ view but when I came to re-read that section, I realised with a jolt that it was not at all objective. What I chose to focus on and describe in detail was not what Stephen would have chosen. I wrote another description but kept both in the book to highlight the difference and give the reader this fuller image.

Just for clarity, ‘our main recording’ refers to me holding a small tape recorder by Stephen as I asked him questions about his life.

…………………………………..

In good weather we’d sit in the garden but our main recording took place in the front room, high ceilinged and squarish, with Classic FM in the background and Charlie the dog wandering in and out. The walls were cream, damp-stained stucco, decorated with a few framed prints plus photos, postcards and large handwritten signs fixed in place with Blu-Tack. The bay windows were covered by faded net curtains and framed by old brown curtains, which trailed in twin heaps on a floor of stained bare boards covered by a threadbare mat.

The door to this room was permanently held back against the wall by a fire extinguisher, and the door handle was used to hang the aprons that Stephen wore to protect his clothes while eating his meals. When you entered the room and faced the windows, the round wooden table where Stephen sat to eat was on your left. One space was held clear by an elderly placemat, while the rest of the surface was taken up by his radio, boxes of medication, cigarette packets, cards and photos, all of which was encrusted with bits of old food.

The table was pushed against the wall and had a pair of simple wooden chairs tucked under it. Between there and the window resided the TV, opposite which were Stephen’s comfy chair and coffee table. This, too, was heavily populated: cigarette packets, lighters, two large ash trays, magazines, rotas for Stephen’s carers, letters, pieces of paper, boxes of earplugs, nasal inhalers and various medications. The two heavily-laden tables were kept apart just far enough to allow a narrow passageway from Stephen’s chair to the doorway.

He smoked 30 to 40 cigarettes a day, so the room was ingrained with the stagnant smell. In the ten years he lived there, the flat received one full clean.

……………………………

That is one way of describing Stephen’s front room. It tells you quite a bit about my view, eg: ‘stained bare boards,’ stuff Blu-Tacked to the walls and piled on the tables ‘encrusted with bits of old food’. This is not how Stephen would have described his flat. So I wrote again, putting on Stephen’s lens.

…………………………

Stephen would have said his flat was ‘special, very special’ because he loved this flat. It was his precious home, and his front room was his safe place. The prints on the wall were ones he’d chosen and the postcards all came from long-standing friends. The pictures carefully blu-tacked on beside them had been cut out from the Country Life calendars that he asked me to buy him each year; prancing lambs and foxes, eagles in flight. Carers had sellotaped encouraging notes on the wall, like ‘Smile Stephen – Think happy 😊’, and the photos balanced on the tables and in front of the TV were of loved ones, his dog and snaps I’d taken of him on outings with my family. The radio and TV were essential: sources of information, humour and sublime beauty. What would he have done without music?’

How different does it feel to read this description?

Over the course of eighteen years, Stephen slowly taught me another way of seeing….

[Taken from the poem ‘The Teachers’ by John Bell]

…………………..

Coming back to that boy on the train and the people who sat opposite. Why did my mind snag on them being his parents? Physically they could have been a fit. When I reflect on it, it was the lack of some intensity of connection which is my experience of being a parent. And by that I don’t necessarily mean wonderful patience and care. It could have been irritation, over concern, shushing him, beaming with pride, insisting one of them sit next to him… Or it could be that my sense of what a parent is, is limited and my brain just didn’t recognise it.

The range of what we think and do
is limited by what we fail to notice.
And because we fail to notice
there is little we can do
to change
until we notice
how failing to notice
shapes our thoughts and deeds.

By: RD Laing