Lately, I've found myself inhabiting two personalities I would have rolled my eyes at five years ago: "busy person" and "rescuer." Since my mom went in for heart surgery and came out with dementia, I've become a mom rescuer, a mom's dog rescuer, and a Bullmastiff Rescuer -- how I love those sloppy, big-hearted dogs.
But rescuing brought on the kind of busyness where everything is a "must do" and very little is a "choose to do." When my meditative self thought of unloading the busyness, my rescuer self couldn't do it -- "this one needs me" or "I made a commitment."
Then my mom's little dog was hit by a car.
The Meltdown
But let me back up a few days. It all started with bad timing. Me and the dogs had to leave one temporary home prematurely and take up another one while fixer-upping our permanent home. We lived in three houses over two weeks -- quite a shake-up for dogs.
By dogs, I mean Mom's dog, my own three dogs, and a foster bullmastiff. Five dogs and shifting turf is a recipe for trouble. So at the second temporary home, my youngest male and the foster dog went at it. A dogfight of the vicious, tear-and-rip kind. It caught me by surprise. They had romped and played together for months. As I tried to break up the rumble, it wasn't calm, meditative, authoritative, dog whispering that transpired. It was screaming, yanking, and kicking.
That was the meltdown.
It wasn't easy to board out the foster dog I had brought back from a cowering, rib-thin orphan and nursed through a 3-month heart worm regimen. But he was more than I could handle just then. When I left him, tail between his legs at his new kennel, my heart sank.
Amid all this, Buddy ran away; I got a midnight flat tire; Mom complained she couldn't breathe. I was by her side when I learned, via voicemail, that Buddy had died. I had to bury him at a friend's house.
I don't recommend meltdown to anyone, but it can reinvigorate or reintroduce your old or abandoned practices. Here are the three I turned to:
#1 "Go into" the feeling
Many Buddhist practices relish these big-energy states -- anger, frustration, grief. In one Buddhist practice, you call up the hard emotions through imagination: "Picture something that made you sad or infuriated..."
Buddhist author Pema Chödrön tells a funny story about a monastery plagued by a miscreant monk who was rude and disturbing in many ways. Eventually the community got together and asked the head of the monastery to oust the miscreant. To their surprise, the head replied, "Why, I pay him to be here. How else would you get to practice with anger and frustration?"
Lucky me, I had real grief to work with.
Here's the practice:
• use whatever works to gain some stillness -- deep breathing, for example
• "sit" with the grief
• explore the emotion without words
• disregard any mental chatter or judgment that comes up
• try not to have any expectations
I like this passive but aware state because you don't have to "be enlightened," you just have to be curious, to observe. Often, you get usable feedback. Not always.
For me, the meditation was short. Sometimes it's the small gesture, like saying "timeout" to worn patterns, that has the big impact. I saw my habitual sense of urgency, my need to create a safe nest for others, my underlying fear that I was without a safe nest myself.
In meditation, many roads lead to fear. But staying with the fear, rather than diving into distraction, can bring clarity and serve as a launch pad for new directions. In my case, I saw how stressful thinking had escalated my situation. I'd been telling myself I could manage over-commitment by trying harder and being more disciplined. I had to let that go. "Harder, faster, more" may work for some, but it was not a realistic direction for me.
#2 Get back to qigong, yoga, or any physical awareness or energizing practice
When nervous busyness escalates, my qigong practice deteriorates proportionately. So I got back to my qigong routine, cobbled together from random YouTube presentations. I had learned my first routine through Lee Holden and others. Tracing the energy signatures of the organs, focusing on body fluidity and breath, you learn things.
After a meltdown, one thing qigong usually reveals to me is how pill bug I've become. That's the little armadillo-shelled, grubby thing (technically a land-dwelling crustacean) that curls into itself when threatened. As events came at me, I was pill bugging, physically and mentally.
#3 Connect with a sense of openness
When I find myself pill bugging, I know it's time to apply an equal and opposite force: opening.
Then the call came in from Bullmastiff Rescuers. A big, brindled mastiff named Boss had an owner and a "forever home" waiting for him halfway across the country. But he had no driver for the leg of his trip that passed through my area. I felt too overwhelmed to think of spending a day on the road. I had just lost one beloved pet, and sent another into exile. Thinking the sensible thing was to downsize on commitments, I said, "No."
Actually, I said, "No, unless you absolutely can't find anyone else."
As it turns out, openness was a road trip. Not just getting away or seeing new things, but being intentional with it. Committing the trip to openness and new directions, I took care to be mindful along the road. I unfurled the pill bug and sat up tall, smelling the air, confronting the rain, windows down, experiencing new places without judgment. It suddenly struck me how much I had hardened, mentally, against my environment. I could hear my habitual self-judging the sights my road-trip self was embracing. I chose to be the grateful explorer. The whole day was refreshing. In meeting Boss and helping him on his way to his "forever home," I had remained open to joy and learned that maybe instead of denying your needs, you just have to come at them from a different angle.
This meltdown is still unfolding, of course. But in the week or two since it all happened, I have carved out some time to be creative. I put in a request to work from home, and have begun to really inhabit the house. I'm managing the hour commute to visit Mom and bring my foster dog some double cheeseburgers. Just not every day.