This morning my 5 year-old son needed a do-over. The impact of all the recent changes in our lives from small things like snow days to big things like his grandmother having breast cancer culminated to a tearful meltdown that on the surface had to do with a school project.
I felt so bad for him as I saw him going down, down, down the rabbit hole. In that moment I wanted to hug him close and say everything will be all right. But this was all at 6:45 in the morning, and for me to get to work for 8 a.m. I have to leave the house by 7:15 to drop him off at daycare. So, rather than a long drawn-out snuggle, I opted for a do-over.
The concept of a do-over is quite simple: let’s act as if we can start again from scratch. Wipe the slate clean and begin anew. If only it were that simple...
I’ve said this before that some of these spiritual tasks are so straightforward to describe, and so easy to commit an intention toward, but damn hard to remember to practice when the shit hits the fan. (Sorry to swear, but let’s just call a spade a spade.) Therefore, we need our reminders in the form of practices, images, symbols and metaphors to help us remember to hit the reset button.
I imagine that button looking like the red "easy" button in the Staples commercial on television. Or like the decision to just totally shutdown your iPhone or computer when it is on the fritz only to switch it back on to see if that solved the problem.
A longer and more luxurious version of this same thing could be a retreat. Lately I have been blogging about some of what I imagine to be the challenges of a mindfulness retreat- like confronting your own restless mind. But what about the fruits of such a time and space?
The word "retreat" itself is a stepping out of usual routine with the hopeful intention of a reset or renewal when we go back in to the trenches. For instance this week I am spending four consecutive days at an advanced training for the type of therapy I practice as a psychotherapist. It is being held in a gorgeous old New England hotel and is filled with mindfulness practices as that is part of what I aim to do with patients. Though not a formal retreat, I hope to reap many of the same benefits including reset and renewal with the possibility of do-overs when I return with the new wisdom I have grown into.
But I have to tell you, my favorite re-set of all is resurrection.
I've heard writer Anne Lamott refer to the word "resurrection" in interesting and unconventional ways that have opened me up to the word itself. Because it is so closely tied to Christianity and Jesus Christ, I had never really considered co-opting the word, nor had felt privileged to do so as a non-Christian.
However, Anne Lamott challenged me to think of resurrection as something I could practice myself, several times a day if need be. In that way, I am paying less attention to how many times a day I fall down or stumble in some way, and more attention to my comebacks. Isn't a mini-resurrection a comeback of sorts? When my son glued himself back together, put one foot in front of the other, and walked out the door to re-start his day again, I said to him "great recovery!" It was a 2 minute start to finish resurrection. Sometimes that's all we need.
It helps us work through our day to day (hour to hour) dysregulation till we can get to experiences like the four day work training I'm at right now, the camping weekend I have planned for the beach in June, or the five day silent meditation retreat I hope to attend in July. Time where we truly are able to go in to the metaphoric cave until we are able (or the times up) to roll the stone away and start anew.
But not just anew, as in now it's Monday and it used to be Friday, but truly, magnificently imagining ourselves as changed in some small or large way. Embodying that difference or shift in perception or outlook. Allowing for whatever change that took place (more often than not an internal change) to begin to ripple through our lives in unknowable ways.
I experience this reset each time I take a yoga class. It comes right at the end when I'm instructed to roll onto my right side from corpse pose in a fetal position and pause there. A moment to stop the doing of the yoga class and take usually just a minute or two to notice and experience the being. To allow this moment of transition from shavassana or corpse pose into this primal body posture we call fetal position that will take me back to my seat before re-entering the rest of my day.
I once watched an interview with writer and local New Englander Dani Shapiro on YouTube in which she was sharing about her yoga practice. She said sometimes her series of asanas done on a mat in her own home can be the only thing that can help her get her day back on track when the challenges of working from home present themselves. After seeing the interview I thought to myself, "yeah, if I were to do 10 sun salutations in succession, is there any way I could not be recalibrated in some palpable way?" And I like the idea that there can be small, medium and large ways that we can practice this.
Re-do. Re-set. Retreat. Resurrect. Re-enter. All versions of the same thing with various nuances to make each valuable and compatible. I think the most important thing is that we not forget the do-over, the resurrection, the retreat, is a tool always available to us whenever we need it. It is just a matter of remembering to pick it up. That's the challenge.
How will you re-set today?
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