Moving Toward Emptiness

In 21st Century life in the Western World it is sometimes hard to find context and translation for these words written in 1948 by Trappist Monk, Thomas Merton in his classic book Seeds of Contemplation:

Let us throw off the pieces of the world like clothing and enter naked into wisdom. For this is what all hearts pray for when they cry: 'Thy will be done.'

When I read these gorgeous words, I know I'm immediately smitten because I will proceed to re-read them again and again (or more paragraphs just like them)- it is like eating more and more bites of a delicious chocolate cake.

But sometimes, instead of more, I find I need to pause and let the words percolate inside of me.  Often during meditation.

Making a decision to not take in more is a pretty radical one, at least in the United States.  In 21st century life we are shaped to continuously seek out the new and the novel.  If you  really like it, get more of it- make it a collection.

I'm not criticizing though.  Just observing.  Because I see the inclination in myself all the time as well.

I truly appreciate that it takes a fair amount of intention (and impulse control) to actually pause and make the decision to take in no more.  No more words. No more stuff. No more stimulation. No more new and novel. No more chocolate cake.

But as my 2 going on 22 year-old daughter might ask: why? Why on earth would you want to do that? What purpose might it possibly serve?

All great questions, that I can only answer from my own small personal experience.  One of them, just months ago at my first 5 Night Silent Mindfulness Meditation Retreat.

It was Day 4 of the Retreat at the 8:30 a.m. meditation sitting. 

At this point I had been engaged in a rotation of 45 minute periods of silent sitting, walking and eating mindfulness meditation for 3 full days starting at 5:45 a.m. and ending at 9:30 p.m., and in that time layers of skin had begun to shed off of me.  I had begun to empty out.

This concept of "emptiness" was quite new to me.  Of course I had read about it, but the words never made it past the page with me.

Not until I read this piece called: Writing Undoes Me by author Pico Iyer that I found one day on his website.

The essay had originally appeared in the periodical Shambhala Sun in November, 2005, and in it, he described the process of throwing off the pieces of the world like clothing and entering naked into wisdom in a way that I could understand.  It was the first explanation of moving toward this concept of emptiness that I had ever understood (at least a little). 

He talks about this process in the context of writing.

To write is to step away from the clamor of the world, to take a deep breath and then, slowly and often with a shaking heart, to try to make sense of the bombardment of feelings, impressions, and experiences that every day and lifetime brings.  The very act of putting them down--getting them out of the beehive of the head and onto the objective reality of the paper--is a form of clarification...

But there is a fatal catch in the process that any Buddhist might mournfully savor...The very fact of trying to explore the mind and its responses, intensely and inwardly, without stepping back, moves one after a while to see that the mind, and the self that talks about the mind, feels no more real than that cloud formation over the mountains, where the sun is beginning to set...

The Buddha famously spoke of the 'jungle of opinions.' To still the mind, he suggested, is to move past layer after layer till you're in a place where the chatterings of the mind, the jungle of opinions, this contention and that certainty, seem as remote as the hubbub in the street when you're seated in a church.  There is a space behind the mind, and that is where all the things that really endure exist.  Speech is where we give and take the wisdom of the world, silence is where we absorb a wisdom that makes the world dissolve...

Writing is a form of meditation, I sometimes tell myself (though no doubt I could say the opposite the next day).  But it's a form that deconstructs itself, so finally you come to feel that writing is just the convulsive exercise you do to get to the place where all writing ceases.

I recalled this piece by Pico Iyer while on the Mindfulness Meditation Retreat, especially on Day 4 when I had an experience during sitting meditation that I had never had before- in fact it happened twice that day.

I was about 20 minutes into a 45 minute sit.  At this point I could drop into a more or less calm and still meditation (as opposed to the earlier days of the retreat that were filled with restlessness, sleepiness and a mind that wouldn't quit chattering). But this time something new happened.

I had this physical sensation of something energetic and tangible being plucked out of my chest (and later that day out of the very top of my head), almost like a bubble or a water balloon.  The physical sensation was not pleasant or unpleasant, pleasurable or painful, it just was a sensation of something leaving my physical body.  It was brief, probably seconds, and when it was over, that was it.

Since that time, being the nerdy intellectual-type that I am,  I have of course talked with meditation teachers and read books about this experience to try to make sense of it. 

And while that has been helpful, like all contemplative experiences, at the end of the day, I have tried to apply my own sense, understanding and wisdom to this new experience which comes in the form of the classic board game Operation.

Do you remember this game?

For those of you who don't, the object of the game is to try to pluck out the game pieces that are stuck in various parts of the human body with a pair of tweezers.  The challenge is, if you touch the edge of the board while removing a game piece, a loud buzzer will sound and you will lose a turn.  Therefore, to win, you must have slow, careful, precision as you gently remove the objects from the body that do not belong.

For me, the experience of practicing deep stillness or mindfulness meditation was the catalyst for movement toward emptiness. 

As Pico Iyer suggested in his piece on writing meditation, I believe the practice itself allowed me to remove layer after layer of thought, experience and sensation that were no longer needed.  Leaving me in greater synchronicity, harmony and deeper understanding of myself within god.  Or as Merton said, For this is what all hearts pray for when they cry: 'Thy will be done.'

How about you? Have you had the experience of moving toward emptiness? How did you interpret this experience?

Fear & Yoga

Last night, when Hillary Clinton accepted the Democratic Party’s nomination for President of the United States, she quoted the famous words of one of the most beloved presidents in the history of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, which were:

There is nothing to fear, but fear itself.

I recalled these most celebrated words as I moved through yoga practice this morning, and particularly as I approached what has been the most difficult yoga pose for me: Crow or in Sanskrit: Bakasana.

 

In the 15 years that I have been moving my body through asana, the poses of a yoga practice, Crow

has been the most challenging for me.

 

At first, I thought my difficulty with this pose was coming from issues like: not enough arm strength or too little balance.

But as my arm strength improved and my balance developed, I had to acknowledge that I might be working with an emotional barrier, not a physical one.  Namely: fear.

I know I am not alone in the yogi world to encounter an emotional obstacle while practicing asana.

I recently finished Claire Dederer’s book called Poser: My Life in Twenty-three Yoga Poses,

and in it she also spoke about how fear manifested itself in her yoga practice; interestingly enough, Ms. Dederer also included how she took on Crow as well!

(I have included several quotations from Poser to share with you below in case you would like a little preview of her writing too).

Even though I am a psychotherapist by day, I am always still amazed at the power of a single emotion to destabilize us- quite literally in the case of yoga.

So this morning, as I considered my approach to this pose that has at times felt like a great teacher at others like a great nemesis, I held FDR’s words in my heart—there is nothing to fear, but fear itself—and I opted to not place a folded blanket right underneath my lifted head as I usually do before I move into this quite arduous (for me) arm balance pose.

Instead, I intentionally directed myself away from my fears, away from the Technicolor video in my head of me falling hard with a crash.

No, instead I tenderly said to myself: “You know can do this.  You have the strength. You have the balance.  Go ahead. Just do it.  No problem.”

And you know what? I did.

For 15 perfect seconds, and with a huge smile swept across my face, I balanced my body into a beautiful Crow- without the safety blanket resting underneath my head.

Working in Crow has been a good lesson for me in working with its emotional correlate: fear.

Master Yogis talk about some of the mystery of asana, and for me, emotional happenstances during asana is a part of that mystery.

How about you? Have you ever encountered a yoga pose that was challenging because of an emotional barrier? How did you work through it?

Favorite Excerpts from Poser

“You might be feeling discomfort now. If it is time to stop, it is time to stop. But if you can, stay with it. What is discomfort? What does it feel like? Is it really pain, or are you just in an unfamiliar situation? That’s an OK place to be.”

“I tried to breathe. I felt a radiating sensation in my right hip. I felt something else, and I recognized it, as if it were a ship on the horizon: relief.  I was finally feeling my own discomfort, my own lack of ease in the world. Discomfort, anxiety, dread- they had been lurking there all along, and I had been avoiding them, rushing away from them, moving quickly so they couldn’t make themselves known.”

“This was a pose that felt right to do alone. To turn inward. This was the most alone of the poses, the kind of alone that you were as a kid.  Contented in your own world. Living inside your own geography. Recognizing that your body was its own territory, bounded and united and sufficient.”

The red-haired yoga teacher with the Indian accent did catch my attention with one thing he said: ‘Those of you who are really bad at yoga, you’re in the right place. I hope everyone will allow themselves to be really crappy today, to walk away from being perfect. The real yoga isn’t in the perfect pose; it’s in the crappy pose that you are really feeling. You want to feel it from the inside out, rather than make it perfect from the outside in.”

“As I prepared for wheel, I thought back to Fran, all those years ago, offhandedly describing the feeling in my chest as fear. It was no joke. It was scary to unfold my chest, to open something that remained so habitually closed.”

[A Yoga teacher named Seidel says the following to Dederer’s yoga class]. “Anyway, I think of yoga as a kind of counterweight to the way I behave in the rest of my life. No matter how hunched I am the rest of the time, I know that for at least an hour or so every day, I’ll have beautiful, open shoulders. I’ve given up on having them in the rest of life. I just enjoy them while I have them.”

“We bickered pleasantly; I had begun to think of bickering not as the beginning of the end of the world but as just another way families communicate. We carried Bruce’s depression and my anxiety with us, on the roof rack, as it were. They weren’t going to leave us alone. They were just part of the deal.”

“I thought I would do yoga all my life, and I thought that I would continue to improve at it, that I would penetrate its deepest mysteries and finally be able to perform a transition from Scorpian directly into Chaturanga. But here’s the truth: The longer I do yoga, the worse I get at it. I can’t tell you what a relief it is.”

Nurturing Equanimity

I’ve been working on a new formula for nurturing equanimity.

It goes like this:

Resiliency + Perspective-Taking + Faith = Equanimity.

I know this is not rocket-science or quantum physics, but it is tough, for me anyway. 

And truth be told, my little formula was propelled forward in a big way this past weekend in a very unlikely place: the drive-in movie theater.

One of my favorite summertime activities is to go to the drive-in to watch a movie. Though now few and far between in the United States, I’m lucky to have a drive-in movie theater about 30 minutes from my house, and we like to go there at least once a year.  

This past weekend I took my son and his friend.

And we did it right. 

We drove in our truck, put chairs and blankets in the back, and ate tons of popcorn while listening to the movie over the car radio and glancing up every now again to the billions and billions of stars in the night sky.

This weekend the movie that was playing was the newest Ice Agemovie- an animated series of movies (I think there are like 5 now) about a Mammoth, a Saber Tooth Tiger and a Sloth who join forces to make an unlikely herd and family in the time of the Ice Age.

The movie itself was utterly ridiculous, but during the movie, while I was sitting back underneath the likes of The Big Dipper, Cassiopeiaand quite possibly the planet Mars (or at least we all agreed it was a star that looked very red!), I had this interesting awareness of the juxtaposition between history (this long, long ago period of time we call the Ice Age), perspective-taking (the vast breath of the galaxy before my eyes), and the 19^th Century quote by Abolitionist and Unitarian Theodore Parker about the moral arc of the universe:

I do not pretend to understand the moral universe. The arc is a long one. My eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by experience of sight. I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends toward justice.

(A quote made famous by theReverend Dr. Martin Luther King when he declared in many a speech including the 1965 March from Selma, Alabama: the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.)

What a moment this was…with all the stars aligning (pun intended!).

I felt like saying out loud: “Ohhhhh, now I get it…”

I had been aspiring to cultivate equanimity through sheer Intention +  Meditation Practice alone, and I had thought that my increased capacity and skill to soothe myself, and “rapidly recover from adversity” asDr. Richard Davidson of the University of Wisconsin defined resiliency in his Ted Talk at Wisdom 2.0 called “Well-being is a Skill,” was really all I needed to improve my ability to recalibrate my own equilibrium. But even with all this efforting (one of my favorite words), my progress seemed slower than a snail.

Now, I see where I was wrong.

Well, maybe not wrong, but misinformed. 

For me, resiliency alone will not yield equanimity.  No, equanimity requires more support.

Last week I wrote a blog entry called “The Stress Response & Political Divides.” I suggested that there is evidence (albeit anecdotal) that this2016 U.S. Presidential Campaign Season is igniting the Fight-Flight-Freeze alarm system in the Central Nervous System of the American people- myself included.

But this past weekend, sitting there underneath a whole universe of solar systems and galaxies, watching this outlandish film supposedly set in prehistoric times, I couldn’t help butregain my sense of perspective by remembering how very small I amand how very short a period of time 4 years actually is within the context of the history of the world.

Then, when I combined thisperspective with the classical words of hope and faith—the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice—resiliency all of the sudden had so much more weight.  In fact, I would say, that is the very moment when Resiliency + Perspective-Taking + Faith came to equal Equanimity.

It was a beautiful A-ha moment for me.

How do you nurture equanimity?

The Stress Response & Political Divides

It seems the current political climate in the United States is fueling The Human Stress Response in Americans, and it worries me greatly.

A quick example.

I was in line at Dunkin’ Donuts (the coffee and pastry version of McDonalds in the United States) the other day, and there was a customer in front of me who was enraged and ranting.

And because demographics are frequently relevant in our current political climate, I will share that this ranting customer appeared to be white, male and roughly 55 years-old.

Amidst his rant, the customer turned toward me (someone who is also white) in line, and shouted: “and people think we should pay these people $15 an hour!”

For a moment I was just bewildered at his statement. 

Though aware of this customer’s presence (how could I not be with all that yelling and anger?), I was not paying particular attention to him.

So when he turned toward me, my initial thought was:

A.)   Who is “we?” and
B.)   Who are “these people?”

(For those of you living in other areas of the world, the “$15 an hour” reference was to the dollar amount that many advocacy groups for low-income and working-class people are fighting for to be the minimum wage in the U.S.)

However, before going down that political, social, economic, and racial polarized divide in my mind, I stopped and really looked more closely at this poor man.

And I’ll tell you, he looked totally stressed out!

His entire body looked like one big ball of tension. Every muscle in his face was constricted. His skin was red. His arm muscles were protruding.

In short, he looked terrified and threatened.

Which caused me, for the first time, to take a look at who was actually standing behind the counter that could possibly be the catalyst to threaten this man’s very existence?

And to my surprise, no one was there.

All of this man’s frightened and angry energy, that was apparently prompted from the fact that he was not being served as quickly as he would have liked, was generated around the hypothetical person or the stereotypical person who this customer imagined would work in a minimum wage restaurant job.

About 5 seconds later, a pimply faced, white, teenage boy with a piercing in his chin, showed up at the register from the back of the restaurant, and the customer said nothing.

They say stress is formed in the mind/body from a “perceived threat.” 

What does that mean though?

Well, if you have ever read the book Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain and Illness by Jon Kabat-Zinn (the co-founder of the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center), you might remember that stress, or the body’s alarm system found the sympathetic nervous system (a.k.a. fight-flight-freeze) is transactional and highly effected by point of view.

Stress, as defined by researcher Dr. Richard Lazarus,

“is a particular relationship between the person and the environment that is appraised by the person as taxing or exceeding his or her resources and endangering his or her well-being.”

Or, in other words, that unfortunate man in Dunkin’ Donuts was actually going into a fight-flight-freeze Stress Response due to his mere thought about how someone “other” receiving an increase in the minimum wage  would have a catastrophic impact on his own very well-being.

If that is not a sad scenario, I don’t know what is…And yet, it makes sense.

Jon Kabat-Zinn reminds us in his chapter called “Stuck in Stress Reactivity” in Full Catastrophe Living that:

The fight-or-flight reaction can be triggered in animals when they encounter members of another species.  It also comes into play when animals are defending their social standing within their own species and when they are challenging the social status of another animal in their group. When an animal’s social position is challenged, the fight-or-flight reaction is unleashed and the two animals in question fight until one either submits or runs away…

People have many more choices in situations of social stress and conflict, but often we get stuck in these same patterns of submission, fleeing, or fighting all the same.  Our reactions in social situations are often not that different from those of animals.  Yet animals of the same species seldom kill each other in social conflicts the way humans do.

Much of our stress comes from threats, real or imagined, to our social status, not our lives. But the fight-or-flight reaction kicks in even when there is no life-threatening situation facing us. It is sufficient for us just to feel threatened.

By causing us to react so quickly and so automatically, the fight-or-flight reaction often creates problems for us in the social domain rather than giving us additional energy for resolving our problems.  Anything that threatens our sense of well-being can trigger it to some degree. If our social status is threatened, or our ego, or our strongly held beliefs, or our desire to control things or to have them be a certain way (‘my’ way for instance), then the sympathetic nervous system lets loose.  We can be catapulted into a state of hyperarousal and fight-or-flight whether we like it or not.

Think about Kabat-Zinn’s words in the context of the reactivity of the customer in Dunkin’ Donuts.

Think about it in terms of the violence against African American men by police.

Think about it in terms of the recent murders of police.

Think about it in terms of the clashes among protest groups outside of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio this week.

Think about it in terms of the hateful statements and chants by the delegates and speakers inside the Republican National Convention this week.

Think about it in terms of the last time you got on the defensive when someone was verbally attacking you.

Say what you want, human beings may be at the top of the food chain, but we are exquisitely sensitive creatures. 

This, in and of itself, is not a problem per se if we act skillfully. If we commit to taking wise wholesome action.  If we do not rationalize harming others for our own gain.

I’ve thought about what I might say to that fuming and terrified man in the Dunkin’ Donuts, and the words of Buddhist teacher, author and activist Thich Nhat Hanh came to mind.

In an interview with TV personality Oprah Winfrey, Thich Nhat Hanh illustrated for viewers how a human being could begin to talk to another human being in a time of conflict and misunderstanding. 

He said:

Dear friends, dear people, I know that you suffer a lot. I have not understood enough of your difficulties and suffering. It's not our intention to make you suffer more. It is opposite. So please tell us about your suffering, your difficulties. I'm eager to learn, to understand.

In the same interview the famous Zen Master emphasized the importance of what he calls “Deep Listening.”

Deep listening is the kind of listening that can help relieve the suffering of the other person. You can call it compassionate listening. You listen with only one purpose, help him or her to empty his heart. And if you remember that you are helping him or her to suffer less, and then even if he says things full of wrong perceptions, full of bitterness, you are still cable to continue to listen with compassion. Because you know that listening like that, with compassion, you give him or her a chance to suffer less. If you want to help him or her to correct his perception, and then you wait for another time. But for the time being, you just listen with compassion, and help him or her to suffer less. And one hour like that can bring transformation and hearing. 

If you read his books and watch his interviews, Thich Nhat Hanh writes and speaks with conviction that this type of skillful, nonviolent communication is a means to a more peaceful end. 

Peace within the self by having fewer reactive stress responses in the middle of Dunkin’ Donuts, and peace within our communities and nations by having fewer instances of violence and war.

Hanh asserts:

It has to start like that, loving speech. And if you are honest, if you are true, they will open their heart and tell us. And then we practice compassionate, deep listening. And during the process of deep listening, we can learn so much about our own perception, and their perceptions. And that is the best way, the only way, to remove terrorism…The fear, the anger and the despair is born on the ground of wrong perception. We have wrong perceptions concerning ourselves and the other person, and that is the foundation for conflict and war and violence.

Tonight is the last night of the Republican National Convention in which Donald Trump will accept the Republican nomination for president. Next week, the Democratic National Convention will make their nomination for Hillary Clinton.  As you watch these events unfold, if you watch these events unfold, I encourage you (and I) to watch for our own Stress Response. 

Pay attention and create awareness around when your muscles begin to constrict and your face starts to heat up in a red flame just like the Dunkin’ Donuts customer.  And when it does, if it does, consider breathing in one big breath of oxygen, slowly letting it out, and taking a moment to listen deeply and try to seek some understanding.

I will try to do the same.  We have to start somewhere.

Moment to Pause

Recently I heard these words about meditation practice:

If you are faithful to your practice, your practice will be faithful to you.

I knew I immediately liked the message of these words, but I couldn’t quite wrap my brain around what they actually meant…Until I did.

About a week ago I experienced a large-scale disappointment.  The kind that feels like the emotional equivalent of being double-punched, hard, right in the belly.

Afterward, I doubled over, and had a moment of confusion and shock. 

At this moment I had a choice:

A.)   Autopilot, Or

B.)    Mindful action.

For me autopilot would have been a combination of strategies to avoid (a.k.a get busy with a project) or withdraw (a.k.a. become an island).

I knew I did not want to do either one, and yet I felt a conditioned, magnetic-pull to do so. 

This paradoxical contradiction is commonly called the “knowing-doing gap.”

However, I am happy to report, in this particular moment, on this particular day, I did not turn the autopilot switch on.  Instead, I took a moment to pause, and I attribute this change largely to my daily mindfulness practices.

A moment to pause is a mindfulness skill that can be the most self-compassionate or compassionate action to be taken in a time of stress or distress.

Of course, it is not rocket science.

Hard, yes.  Counter-intuitive (for some of us), absolutely.  But difficult to understand, not really.

The website of the University of Wisconsin Psychiatry Department , home of scientific-mindfulness guru Dr. Richard Davidson, defines the Moment to Pause this way:

The ‘Pause Exercise’ is a brief exercise that can be used anytime and anywhere. It helps us shift gears from being wrapped up in our thinking about future or past and come to settle in the present…You can use it to pause in the middle of your day or in the face of a stressful experience. After you finish you simply make the next best choice for you and move back into your activities.

There is no “one way” to practice this skill, mainly because it is exactly what it sounds like (another aspect about mindfulness which I truly appreciate!), but for the person who is looking for more formal instruction, the University of Wisconsin offers the following:

Pause - Awareness: Stop what you are doing. If sitting, sit upright in a dignified but not stiff posture. If standing, stand upright but not rigid. Be aware of what is happening in your experience. Take a moment to take note of seeing, hearing, body sensations, thoughts, emotions. Notice liking, disliking or spacing out. Simply observe, acknowledge and register your experience, even if it is unwanted. Come home to this moment as it is right now. The essence of the pause is being aware of your present moment’s experience, however it is.

Relax- Dropping into the Body: Relax the body and gently redirect full attention to the body. Feel the support of the contact places of the body, the feet, the buttocks, the back of the thighs, the hands, the lips, the eyelids. Feel the direct experience of the sensations, touch, pressure, softness, firmness, warmth or coolness. Open to the sensations and your physical experience throughout the whole body.

Breathe: Direct your attention to your breath. Feel each in and out breath. Let it be in its own natural rhythm. Your breath and body can function as an anchor to bring you into the present and help you tune into a state of awareness and stillness.

Open - Expanding: Expand the field of your awareness around your breathing, so that it includes a sense of the body as a whole, your posture, and facial expression. Open up to the breath and body and sounds. Open up to the breath and body and sounds and sights. Open up to all senses as you move into your life.

Given the size of my disappointment, my Moment to Pause was a bit larger in scale, and I chose to spend a day hiking and biking by myself. 

No children. No iPhone. No ear buds for music along the way. No talking.  And one more thing, no rumination. 

In the 4 hours I was hiking in the woods and in the 2 hours I was on my bike, I intentionally did not analyze the causes and conditions of this disappointment.  I did not try to process the thoughts and feelings that sprung from this disappointment either (and that is really hard for a psychotherapist to do I might add!). 

Nope, when I was hiking, I hiked. And when I was biking, I biked.

My mind was not blank to be sure.  All kinds of thoughts, feelings and body sensations passed through during the day.  Some related to the disappointment.  Some completely random and unrelated.  But at the end of the day, all of the thoughts, feelings and body sensations, as a meditation teacher Michael once said, arose, expressed themselves and then disappeared.

When I went home at the end of the day, I felt kind of proud of myself that I had taken this new approach to a life event that historically could have really knocked the wind out of me for some time. 

And then I realized, a few months ago, on a snowy February day, I had taken another Moment to Pause.

I know I didn’t call it a Moment to Pause at the time, but when I reflect, I realize that is exactly what it was.

It was a time when my mother was about to have her 3^rd cancer surgery in 2 months, and I was beginning to burn-out with all the classic symptoms of care-giver fatigue.

I remember deciding to walk down this bike path that was covered in snow, and, as I had not planned to take this walk in advance, I was not even wearing my snow boots. 

About 30 minutes in I found myself just stopping right in the middle of the path, and turning to the side so that I could see both where I had been, where I stood, and where I was going all at the same time.  It was like I needed to just stop, pause, and take stock of the moment before I could proceed any further.

I remember it was not a long time that I paused. Maybe 60 seconds.( In part because my feet were so cold!)  But it was enough.  Enough to be able to turn around, and as the University of Wisconsin website suggested, simply make the next best choice for myself and move back into my activities.

I think off-the-cushion moments like these are becoming more readily available to me as I continue to practice.  Perhaps that is what was meant by: If you are faithful to your practice, your practice will be faithful to you.

Yours in faith,

Claire.