Category Archives: Mindfulness

Who’s Giving and Who’s Receiving?

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Okay, so the people in my exercise class at the Day Care Center for the Elderly in Jerusalem don’t quite have this one down yet…

A friend of mine was over a week or so ago saying that she felt she wasn’t contributing to the world and wanted to do something to help someone somewhere. I suggested volunteer work and mentioned that I’d seen a few volunteer opportunities in the newspaper that morning. We agreed that I’d look for the information and she’d get back to me.

Looking back over the possibilities, three jumped out at me. Two involved 3-4 hours a week gardening – one on the grounds of a hospital and one in the Botannical Gardens – and one gave several options of activities to lead at an Adult Day Care Facility.

My friend never got back to me for the information but I decided to check them out for myself. The gardening options got ruled out because of timing and logisitics (maybe the Israeli summer sun was a contributing factor in dampening my enthusiasm) so I made an appointment to meet with the social worker at the Adult Day Care Center just a 5 minute walk from my yoga teacher’s house where I do yoga every Thursday until 11 a.m.

The Bet Frankforter Adult Day Care Center is in a beautiful, old, former residence made out of lovely Jerusalem stone. There are three groups of elderly people who take the shuttle provided for them from their homes to the center every day. Each group is comprised of about 20 or 25 men and women and each group has a different level of physical capabilities.

The social worker, Tzillah, is a British olah (immigrant) who has been living in Israel for 30 years. Her Hebrew is heavily accented and not all that fluent. It’s easy to live in Jerusalem and get by with English.  She was warm,  enthusiastic and clearly in love with the people who participate in activities at the Center.

The Assistant  Director of the Center, Efrat, is a younger Israeli woman who radiates patience, commitment and, yep,  mindfulness. With a desk full of tasks, she didn’t appear the least bit distracted in her answers to Tzillah’s questions or mine. She had that enviable ability to be fully present for the person or issue of the moment.

Tzillah took me downstairs to watch a young Arab man lead the less mobile group in exercise activity. The room was full of people happily participating; each one doing what he or she could. The exercise wasn’t strenuous, to say the least, and I found myself wondering if I could fill 45 minutes with such minimal movement.

I agreed to start the very next day. Tzillah and Efrat were both extremely appreciative and happy and hustled me into the Director’s office – another woman – this one dressed quite elegantly – who greeted me so graciously I felt a bit embarrassed at my small commitment of 45 minutes a week.

To be honest, there is a bit of an “old people’s smell” and feeling to the building, beautiful as it is. I began to wonder what I’d gotten myself into. I remembered one of my social work practicums which was in geriatrics. Every single person I met in the first week of my practicum, barring none,  was no longer longer alive by the end. Not that I had a hand in their demise, but it was still a bit disheartening.

That night I made a playlist on my iPod especially for the new exercise experience. Tzillah had said that they prefer quiet background music and, indeed, that was what the morning’s volunteer exercise instructor had on.

But I decided that, hey, these folks are old but not dead.

I started out with some quiet but cheerful music to do some pranayama exercises (which I’d call breathing exercises for them). A little Mamas and the Papas and a Beatles instrumental piece or two. And then I kicked into 20 minutes of salsa tunes. Decided to finish up with some quiet sitar music so should I decide to be way out there, I could do some guided imagery with them. (Hmmm…could they hear?)

When I got there the next day I found my class sitting at tables drinking coffee. Uh oh. Wrong place? Wrong time? I headed back upstairs to ask someone what was up and was accosted by a couple of octogenarians…”Are you the new exercise teacher? Come with us!”

Come with them I did and within seconds they had the tables cleared away and the coffee cups disappeared and my group was ready to begin.

They loved the pranayama. They loved the salsa music. They corrected each other putting a hand on a leg “No, not that leg. The other leg.” They smiled and answered when I asked if something was too hard or if they understood what I meant (I’ve taught dance, aerobics, yoga and meditation for decades and rarely heard so much as a mumbled reply).

They closed their eyes and went with me to their very own “safe place” in a 5 minute guided meditation.

When we were done I asked them specific questions about the breathing, the exercise and the guided imagery and they were forthcoming in their opinions – but gently.

“The music was great. We always get a steady diet of boring around here.”

One man said that he planned to try to get back to his safe place that night if he had trouble falling asleep.

But mostly they were just happy and appreciative and friendly and welcoming.

I’d been having an off week. Feeling kind of blah. But I left there feeling a cheerful glow from inside. The smile didn’t leave my face as I left and didn’t leave my heart as I went along the rest of my day.

Today when I walked up the small mountain near my home I saw a beautiful blue butterfly fluttering. I stopped to watch it, waiting for it to rest somewhere so I could take a better look. When it landed on a prickly purple bulb and closed its wings I saw that from the outside it was a decidedly undramatic light brownish grey. Not at all something anyone would stop to look at. But when the butterfly once again took flight, the full majestic glory of that electric blue was quite breathtaking.

What a gift!

And such was the gift of the mostly chair-bound exercise group in that building that smells like old people. The unfolding of their hearts to mine and mine to theirs in return made me wonder who was doing the giving.

 

For Better or for Worse But Not for Lunch

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My husband had an uncle who lost his job at some point. Apparently he couldn’t find another and couldn’t face the disgrace of not having a job. Every day he got up, got dressed like usual, took the lunch his wife packed for him and left the house as if he were going to work. Every day for years. Until he could “safely” say he was retired.

They say that men define themselves by their work and women don’t. I’m thinking maybe they had in mind an earlier age in time.

I think I basically retired.

I’ve never had a normal job – well, when I was pregnant with our oldest daughter who just turned 35, I worked for The State of Wisconsin updating licensing for nursing homes. You don’t get much more normal than that, I suppose. Punched a clock, checked paperwork all day and could’ve made more money working at MacDonalds.

But generally speaking, I’ve always had jobs where I’ve made my own decisions, kept my own hours on a per project basis and noone really knew what I was doing or where I was doing it.

When I was in college I worked for a labor union – long since defunct – whose regional offices were 300 miles away in Chicago and national offices were in New York. My job was to show a strike film to rank-and-file around the state of Wisconsin. In 6 months I might have shown that film 3 times. It’s a family joke to this day.

But I turned into a responsible person at some point and  worked harder and put in more hours in my self-devised frameworks than lots of people do in the places where the clock gets punched.  No dropping the pencil mid-sentence at exactly 4 o’clock for me.

I planned building projects and supervised them going up on virgin hills. I took SOS calls when electricity went out in the middle of the night or contractors threatened to walk off the job. I spoke to the press at the sites of terrorist attacks, political rallies and at dramatic turns of events of all kinds. I solicited philanthropic funds all over the world.

Wow! I’m even impressing myself!

And then, about two years ago, I stopped.

It didn’t happen in a day, or a week or a month.

I started screening my calls from the media, taking only those from the largest agencies that I couldn’t ignore. I started skimming the newspaper, checking only one or two news sites and only once or twice a day.

All those articles about lowering your tension levels by giving up reading the news? They’re true. Ahhhh! How nice not to know. And what do we know from reading the news anyway? As Mark Twain said, “If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you do read the newspaper, you’re misinformed.” Wise man.

I had stopped taking on new clients several years previously  in theory. I turned theory into reality. Slowly but surely, my “current projects”  finished up and became past clients.

I’d begun listening to dharma podcasts and found myself, more and more, listening to them on my morning walk instead of listening to music. And the music I listened to at the end of the podcasts changed. Until one day, or over a period of several months, I came to the realization that the principles had been soaked up into the very fabric of my thinking, feeling and  behavior and the calming music had become my music default.

I found a yoga class I loved and found that yoga added to meditation added to dharma equaled a peaceful happiness that served me and all those around me well.

Sounds idyllic, right?

There was this one little cloud on the horizon. When people would ask that question “So, what are you up to these days?” I heard myself hedging. Making the 3 clients I still handle sound like a real job. Embellishing the help I give a friend who’s directing a big project in the Galilee and the Negev.  Hinting at a busyness that, in actuality, has more to do with travelling around the country to see my granddaughters than anything else.

Had I become Gershon’s Uncle Sam? Metaphorically taking the packed lunch off to “as if” work every morning? Was my definition of myself really that dependent on my work and the status of what I do as I perceive it in the eyes of others?

I practiced the other night answering that question differently. No hints of greatness or fame. Her: “So, what are you up to these days?” Me: “I’m doing alot of yoga and meditation.” Her: Those are the main things you’re doing?!?”

YIKES!!

Me: “Yep.”

Oh, so proud of myself. I did it. I stopped packing my lunch. I retired.

Now I just have to worry about how it’ll be when Gershon retires. You know the adage – “For better or for worse, but not for lunch.”

Here and Now in the Shuk

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Thursday is one of my favorite days of the week.

When I open my eyes on Thursdays as 6 a.m. approaches, my body decides for me whether or not to head out on my usual hour walk through the misty valley and up the little mountain near my house. Lately I’ve been trying to remember to say the morning blessing of gratitude for waking up to another day and sometimes that 30 seconds is just enough to fight off the temptation to close my eyes and roll over again into that blissful morning slumber.

By 7:15 the house smells like fresh-ground coffee and there’s freshly sliced fruit on the table – the best in the world. My husband is the morning chef, like his father before him and our older son, who’s continuing the tradition.

After our morning schmooze, I’m out of the house by 8:30 to get to my weekly hour and a half yoga class in Jerusalem. After trying yoga about a dozen times in various studios from California to New York to Jerusalem, I’d about given up on it when I happened onto Rachel’s class. Wow! She does a holistic yoga which includes special breathing and stretches which ease my relatively inflexible body into delicious poses.

Most Thursdays I round up our younger son from the beautiful new Supreme Court Building where he’s clerking and we go to the nearby Mahane Yehuda Shuk for lunch.

Rafi lived just 3 blocks from The Shuk for his last two years of law school and acquired a love for The Shuk to rival my own. He and I wander The Shuk, buying a few things but mostly soaking up the sounds and the colors.

The one place we never miss is Oz the fish monger’s basta. Oz is the very quintessence of basterionarim. A grumpy middle-aged Sephardi guy who always has a 3-day growth of dark beard and a scowl on his face. Despite the demeanor, now that I’ve been buying fresh fish there once or twice every week for a year, he hurls endearments my way instead of insults.

Oz's Father Helps Out at Oz's Basta

“Where’ve you been, Mami,” he shouts when I’ve been out of the country for a few weeks. Or “I’ve been saving two of my most beautiful trout for you, Metuka Sheli.” (my sweet one)…and he has.

Further on is “my” spice man. The smells and colors…nothing compares. I often wonder how he supports his family selling 100 grams of mustard seeds and 200 grams of cardamon. But there he’s been for the past 30 years I’ve been coming to The Shuk. And like most of the basterionarim at The Shuk, he probaby inherited the basta from his father.

Most of the basterionarim in The Shuk have little education. Many of them did not complete high school. Alot of them are rich. Their day begins before dawn and they work hard all day. They’re as honest as the day is long (maybe a tad less honest with tourists). You can trust their word. They’re good to their clients…though they probably don’t call it customer relations.  Oz isn’t the only one who “saves” his best produce for his preferred customers. Sometimes they tell shoppers they’re out of something only to pull that same something out of the back room for their regular clients.

My husband markets fruit to wholesalers, some of whom also have bastas at The Shuk. We’ve gotten to know many of them very well and are invited to their family simchas (family events). Often there are tables and tables of just men…basterionarim. Their wives aren’t encouraged to go out alot but if they do come along they’re always amazing to look at. Dressed like celebs with the kind of high heels it’s suicidal to fall off of. Danskos are so much more comfortable but, oh!, those high heels are to die for.

One basta I frequent for vegetables is owned by an Arab man who is a 2nd generation basta owner. His son works alongside him every now and then – but rarely. We talked about it one day and he sounded a little bitter. He said that he’s not willing for his son to live the life he lives. In spite of his wealth, he said that he regrets not having an education, and is determined that his son (who loves The Shuk) will go to university and do something else with his life.

I get that. It’s a hard life. I’m happy that Rafi is clerking at The Supreme Court instead of getting up at 3 a.m. to stack fruit, dealing with thousands of people a day who want everything a little bit cheaper and falling into bed exhausted at the end of another 15 hours of physical labor.

But The Shuk is still one of the things that make Thursdays one of my favorite days of the week.

What a variety of colors , shapes, smells and sounds! What a variety of humanity passes me by as I wander! What an abundance of the blessings we find here on earth!

“Halva – al ha-sakin!” (halva slices cut fresh) “Agvania b’shekel!” (only one shekel for a kilo of tomatoes)

If I’m given my choice of the top ten places I want to be mindfully in the here and now, Mahane Yehuda is definitely on the list.

Silence is Golden

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Let us be silent that we may hear the whisper of God…Emerson

For the past two years I’ve participated in a silent meditation retreat offered by the woman who brought Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) to Israel in 2002. It’s a very special time out of time.

My youngest son’s reaction to the concept of such a retreat says alot. After I told him last week that I’d be away again for 4 days in silence, and after a brief pause, he said that he couldn’t remember a time that he was silent for more than 2 hours while awake.

I remember about a decade ago listening to a tape cassette (remember those?) of a lecture given by Sylvia Boorstein about “right speaking”. She had people in the audience raise their hands if they’d broken a bone and then if it was still a source of pain. Then she had people raise their hands if they’d been hurt by other people’s words and then if that was still a source of pain. You can guess what the results were.

In that same tape, she gave an instruction which has stuck with me all this time and which I try to put into practice when I’m mindful enough to remember. The instruction is, before a thought is released into the air with words, to consider what my motivation is – is it good or not-so-good? Maybe it’s to make me look smart or perpetuate some other image I have of myself. Maybe to protect myself from potential  insult or getting hurt in some way. Maybe it’s to persuade someone to adopt my opinion or way of life.

Next – if the motivation is good  – what’s my goal and, given the situation in that moment, is there a possibility of reaching the goal?  Is the other person too angry, sad or stuck to be open to hearing what I have to say? Is there unpressured time to talk? Are there other people around who make it an inappropriate place to express my thoughts?

Someone in the audience said that it would take so long time to get through that process that noone would ever say anything. Her answer? And wouldn’t the extra silence be a wonderful thing?

Would it?

My youngest daughter spent 10 days in a silent meditation retreat in Thailand about five years ago. It was one of those strict silent retreats where people get up at 4 a.m.  to spend the entire day in silent sitting, walking, and working practice. The silence is only broken for a 2-hour chanting meditation practice and, every other day, the possibility of a half hour personal interview with one of the monks. She said that a number of people literally went crazy being left alone with their own thoughts and left the retreat.

As Anne Lamott says, “The mind is like a dangerous neighborhood. I try not to go into it alone.”

In the retreat this year, we broke silence in small groups each evening. It was a time for people to ask very specific questions regarding difficulties or confusion in their direct experience with the meditation retreat. No advice could be offered by other retreatants. No “Oh yeah, that happens to me sometimes and I usually…” Only the group leader commented and only with specific instruction how to deal with whatever issue was raised. Several people in my small group talked about how hard they were finding being alone with their thoughts for hours and hours.

One very articulate, attractive woman said that she’d thought the retreat would be a relaxing, peaceful holiday; that her life is good and her friends were jealous of her getting this special time away. She went on to say that it’s far more relaxing and peaceful at home and at work. She was unpleasantly surprised at how upset and anxious she was every moment of her “special time away”.

At the conclusion of the retreat, this particular woman said that it never got any better.

In most of our lives, should we be lucky enough to have time on our own, how many of us use it to think,  meditate, enjoy nature, to just be with ourselves? There’s iPad, iPod and iPhone. There’s TV, DVD, Kindle, podcasts and games online. There’s Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. There’s shopping and chatting, planning and making lists. And, if all else fails, there’s always the possibility of a well-deserved nap.

I have quite a bit of time to myself. In fact, easily 50% of my waking hours are spent alone. Probably more. I have a daily sitting meditation practice (well, almost daily) but, truth be told, I’m inordinately proud of devoting 20 minutes out of my 17 hour day to sitting on my meditation cushion. Hmm.

Tara Brach said in one of her talks that a famous Indian guru was asked if one has to be Hindu to meditate and his answer was, “I not Hin-du; I un-do.”

Hmmm. 20 minutes out of 17 hours (or 1020 minutes). What percentage of my day is spent in “un-do” mode?

About 2 weeks ago, I had a playlist of Donna de Lory, Jaya Lakshmi , Krishna Das, Lama Gyurme, Wah! and the like  on while doing an hour and a half of yoga and  meditation on my back porch. When I’d gotten my stuff organized to bring in the house, I was in the middle of a beautiful song so I sat down in a chair, put my legs up on a table, closed my eyes and let the sun bake my face and warm my bones while the song finished.

It was a beautiful feeling of “un-do”.

The next song came on. And then the next. And thoughts about the things I’d planned to do next came up.  I let them float by and basked in the un-do of the moment. No thinking. No planning. No doing.

It couldn’t have been more than half an hour until I was once again “on my way to somewhere else”. That place we spend so much time.

Looking back I see how rare that half hour is in my life. I vow to un-do more often and to cherish that time. But I also feel a huge amount of gratitude for the promise that such time holds for me. That I’m not (or at least am no longer) the people who went crazy and left the retreat in Thailand. That the 4-day silent retreat was a peaceful, relaxing holiday for me, though I’d compare it more to a mountain-climbing holiday than a stretch-out on the beach in Ko-Mak.

Some people are born with a natural appreciation for silence and solitude. I’ve nurtured my relationship with silence for the past 20 years. Today I can say that I’ve made good friends with silence. It’s a result of becoming good friends with myself.

LOVE AFTER LOVE

Derek Walcott

 The time will come

When, with elation,

You will greet yourself arriving

At your own door, in your own mirror,

And each will smile at the other’s welcome

and say, sit here.  Eat.

You will love again the stranger who was your self.

Give wine.  Give bread.  Give back your heart

to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you have ignored

for another, who knows you by heart.

Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,

peel your own image from the mirror.

Sit.  Feast on your life.

Bookmooch

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I’m one of those people who can de-clutter my house and my life every day and always have more stuff lying around. I accumulate stuff like Pigpen accumulates dust. It’s like spontaneous generation.

You know how there are some “truisms” that seem ironclad? One of them for me is that I should have less stuff. I should toss out things that I don’t love, that I haven’t used in the last year (or is it the last 6 months? yikes!) and/or that doesn’t work.

I was happy to have that truism debunked a couple of weeks ago by someone who has debunking power with me. She said that she, too, was caught up in all the fascination with de-cluttering until she looked around at the “clutter” in her house and realized that most of it was simply a reflection of a wonderfully rich life filled with people she’s blessed with loving and being loved by.

Okay, that calmed my de-cluttering guilt quite a bit. But even a reflection of all that rich life has to have limits aside from the very furthest reaches of the walls of the house and every flat surface therein.

I’ve chosen the holy of holies when it comes to collections of baby boomers – books – to assuage my de-clutter urge. Granted, this may be easier for me than for some other people in a few ways.

1. None of my children read books in English when it comes to reading for enjoyment. So that seriously limits the number of people with whom I just have to share wonderful books I’ve loved.

2. Most of my friends either don’t exactly share my taste in books or they have ebook devices.

3. I, myself, have a Kindle and do most of my reading on that device so I accumulate far fewer books than I did before an extended period of travel which encouraged me to buy an ebook device in the first place. (Yes, even a committed bookaphile like me does abandon holding a “real” book in my hands for the comfort and convenience of holding an ebook device!)

And, yet, I find myself with anywhere from 30-50 non-resource books on my shelves at any given time. The number creeps up on me. Maybe the books clone in the dark while I’m asleep. I diligently de-clutter, give away, sell to the used book store for awhile and then I guess I don’t.

Along came the solution in the form of bookmooch.com. Very simple idea really.

You register the books you are willing to part with and, when other members of the site ask for them, send them off in the mail and gain credits. Once you have credits you can browse the books listed by site members (there are many thousands) and spend your credits receiving books from others.

Sure, you have to pay for postage on the books you send out but that costs alot less than a new book and, in Israel, even less than a used book. And – here’s the point – it’s de-cluttering par excellence. Books magically appear and disappear. I’ve now happily sent off 12 books – gone – poof! – off the shelves – and received 3 with 5 more on the way.

I even listed two books on my wishlist and one of those is on its way from the US to my post office box. A book I’ve been wanting to read for almost a year, but not enough to buy a new copy. (btw, if you have My Korean Deli, please let me know – i’m wishing for it)

Several years ago, one of my daughters-in-law introduced me to an organization dedicated to not buying new things. People sign up with a commitment to buy only used items all year long. She mostly tries to follow this philosophy and succeeds admirably. Manhattan being what it is, she’s even found some gorgeous furniture for her living room down in the basement of her building awaiting incineration or on the curbside out on the streets of the Upper West Side.

I like shopping for new clothes for my granddaughters, new girlie accessories for them, new clothes for myself, new gadgets…hmmm, shopping for new stuff in general, I guess…too much to give it up altogether.

But bookmooch.com is going on my list of three things to be grateful for today and that new blender I bought to make smoothies that I’ve never eaten before in my life and apparently am in no danger or eating in the near future, is going to my son-in-law who will actually use it.