What I Learned

Posted on May 15, 2020 by Shawndra Miller

There was a lag between my dad’s tests and the results. We knew something was wrong, and it could be bad, but we didn’t know for sure. The Saturday between his test and the oncologist appointment, I stopped over as usual for lunch after hitting the farmers’ market. It was a brilliant June day in 2011, and Dad was making the most of it in the back yard. Mom and I agreed: We wished we could just freeze time.

Dad on a summer day

We couldn’t. The oncology appointment brought the kind of news every family dreads: terminal cancer.

I sometimes feel, now, like I’m in “please freeze time” mode. A pervasive sense of dread stalks some of my days and many of my nights. Watching swifts in their lilting flights as I walk my dog early in the morning, I have a weird sort of anticipatory nostalgia. This spring has been stunningly beautiful. The world is so inviting. And who knows what lies ahead for my family, my community, my country, the world?

But then again, who ever knows? We just think we will keep on our merry way, that nothing will ever change, but that’s an illusion.

But time can slow down a bit, when you pay close attention and know that you are really there, occupying the moment with all your senses.

Follow the path with senses open…

What I learned from that horribly short period between Dad’s diagnosis and his death (and from what came next) is this: We can handle the worst. We get through it. There are still beautiful moments even in the awfulness. Dad speaking into a circle of family and friends around a fire. Grinning over a fat slice of cake, his 71st birthday. Going to the front door to thank the folks from church who surrounded the house in song one evening. Hugging me close, saying he didn’t want to leave us. Tender times I will never forget.

This is a tender time for us all, no matter how we show up for it, and the intensity packs a punch. I won’t soon forget standing in a parking lot with tons of neighbors spaced more or less 6 feet apart, scanning the skies for a Blue Angel flyover tribute to essential workers (including my nurse spouse, who got to be there too). Hailing from a pacifist tradition, I didn’t expect tears to well up, but they did.

There are many things I will remember as touchstones in the coming months, no matter what happens. And being here with my whole body/mind/spirit is the only way to navigate the uncertainty.

Rooted

Gratitude: Sharing garden plants with friends and neighbors feels so abundant, and brings Dad back to me. We dug up Virginia bluebells that had spread all through his and Mom’s yard since he’s not there to thin them. We took some to Kate, who gave us two different kinds of tomatoes and 3 different kinds of peppers, plus basil. A neighbor came by with cilantro starts and went home with shovelfuls of various overgrown perennials from our yard. I have my eye on some wild ginger and salad burnet spreading in my beds that I can pass to another gardening neighbor. And on it goes.

Tip of the Day: Try this practice from Martha Beck to bring you into your body and the moment: Notice 5 things you can see, 4 things you can hear, 3 things you can feel, 2 things you can smell, and 1 thing you can taste. Now experience them all at once. Guaranteed to take you out of your thinking mind and into your body.

Resource of the Day: Check out this article from time expert Laura Vanderkam about savoring time to stretch out the feel-good moments (and to make memories more vivid).

Looking Down

Posted on April 11, 2020 by Shawndra Miller

For a short month during my horse-crazy girlhood, I took horseback riding lessons. I remember riding around an indoor arena. I remember not being allowed to choose the same horse each week, because “you’re learning to ride horses, not a horse.” Beyond that, I don’t remember much.

Other than the instructor telling me repeatedly, “Look where you want the horse to go.”

Weirdly, I couldn’t seem to do it. Down and to the side, that’s where my eyes went, to the churned-up wood chips on the floor.

Looking back, I think I was rattled by the stimulating environment and the scary thrill of being high on a horse’s back. All I could see was the ground.

I sort of thought I was looking forward, and I was even more rattled by the frustrated instructor’s repeated injunction to “stop looking down.” I may have managed to glance at the horse’s ears a few times, if not actually through them to where I wanted the horse to go. (On the other hand, where was there to really go in that small arena?)

Did I mention I was a myopic and dreamy child? When I later started driving, on rainy days I found myself absorbed by the raindrops hitting the windshield of the vehicle, vs. the street I was driving down.

But about the riding lesson, two things come to mind. 1) It’s hard to learn something new while overstimulated or scared, and no amount of clear instruction will change that; and 2) Looking where you want to go, while good policy, may require some preliminary work.

I was reminded of this episode by Martha Beck’s video, Thriving in Turbulent Times. In it, she talks about being mindful of your focus, and training it toward where you want to go—looking between the horse’s ears, say, or kicking into a goalie’s net. Or moving toward a future defined by resilience, justice, and mutuality.

I absolutely love this idea, and it makes total sense, and I have sought out evidence the positive side of humanity, wanting to put my focus there. I live for the kind of good news that can somewhat counterbalance the hard stuff (see Resource of the Day below).

And I also know that for me, sometimes there’s a crucial first step before I can reclaim my focus from where I don’t want to go.

I must first find a way to hear the parts of me that may not be on board with positivity in the moment. I need to find a way to calm my nervous system. I need to be extra extra gentle with myself for falling into an unwanted pattern.

(Martha Beck is also down with this, by the way, so I’m not dissing her work in any way.)

This week I went to ground a bit. John Prine died, the refrigerator broke, I had to wear a mask to the drug store for the first time. Everything piled up and seemed sad and scary and hard. I couldn’t sleep. I found myself sinking into despair and anxiety, overloading my nervous system, ending up shaky and overwhelmed—then making it worse by shaming myself for going there.

Enough already. A good cry is as necessary as a good nap, in my book. Why do we have tear ducts, if not to use them?

If I let myself look down, or allow full absorption in the raindrops instead of the street ahead, it can be a relief. It’s honest. Right now, my body says (from the floor, curled up in a sobfest), this is where I need to be. Time enough later for windshield wiping and plotting a course.

Me and my brother and one of our cousins, long before the lessons.

Gratitude: One thing that has really sustained me, and given incentive to continue this project, is all the feedback I’ve received, even third-hand. In addition to this blog, I sent out an e-newsletter called How Will We Choose to Live? that received more responses than any in recent memory. Thank you to everyone who takes time to read these words. I know how much content is out there to wade through, and I’m honored.

Tip of the Day: A double-edged one today. Writing this series has helped me, and has given me a sustaining project, an outlet. Friends are going deep into gardening, or rediscovering crocheting, or learning languages, or making masks. Maybe there’s a project that can help you through this time.

But maybe it’s also, conversely: Don’t try too hard to get shit done. Maybe don’t try out a new skill or join another online lecture. There might be some inner tending that needs to happen before new learning can happen. Do we really need to take a free Yale course on well-being right now? Maybe the highest of higher education is found down deep within.

Resource of the Day: In the good-cry department, here is John Krasinski’s “Some Good News” episode 2. I love everything about this DIY online news show, which gave me a fine place to land while surfacing from my funk. Around minute 9 is where it really kicks up a notch, at least for Hamilton fans.

A New Framework

Posted on November 17, 2017 by Shawndra Miller

Over the last number of years, I’ve noticed that my usual driven way of attacking my life has not worked well for me. If I were a car, I would have had my engine set to rev even at idle.

Photo by proby458 (Paul), via Flickr Commons

At some point I realized that the goal-oriented way I was socialized—that all of us in the Western world have been socialized—actually made things harder. As someone with many projects/passions/interests, I got a rush from setting goals and planning out steps. I loved putting target dates on my calendar and making out lists. (Still do!)

But when it came right down to it, being fueled by adrenaline was not good for my health.

Then there were all the times I fell short and beat myself up, or ended up needing to move all my targets around because I missed one.

That old system started to seem incredibly wasteful, as I got in touch with its cost, and looked at the results. Could I get to the same place with greater efficiency, ease, and joy?

I couldn’t figure out exactly what to do differently, but I knew the word “goal” had become tainted for me. Even “setting intentions” seemed dicey. I started to lean toward words like “commitment” or “pledge” to define what I had decided to do. And yes, I still wanted take action in service of a commitment to myself or others. (I still have many many things I want to put out into the world.)

What to do? I didn’t have a new framework in place that worked.

Penney Peirce’s book Leap of Perception has given me fresh perspective and an alternative path to explore. Willpower, she says (the heavy foot on the gas pedal) is old school, because it assumes that we are outside of All That Is, outside of what we want to bring into our lives. She calls intention “attention with willpower added,” and declares the addition unnecessary, a defunct habit.

But if we experience ourselves enfolded in with everything, part of a holographic universe, creation is a matter of soft attention. Our next right action emerges based on moment-to-moment nudges that invite a resource/experience/project/etc. to form. It happens not through force, but through connection.

Others have talked about this, including Martha Beck—how aligning with what wants to be born allows it to emerge in effortless partnership with you. But I never quite got it till now: How resting in the present moment, paying attention, holding a vision gently, taking inspired action—all come together in bringing something into form.

In my recent Full Attentional Living series, we did an experiment to feel the physical difference between applying force and universal love. As Martha Beck demonstrates in this video, the latter is monumentally stronger.

It may seem like Jedi-level stuff—connect to Flow and melt your “opponent’s” resistance!—but anyone can experience it by tapping into a sense of unconditional love, perhaps for an animal companion.

And knowing that, why would I think I need to continue exercising my willpower to power through my tasks?

Weird Kid/Gone Berrying

Posted on June 8, 2017 by Shawndra Miller

My plan was to blog about weirdness today. Knowing my weirdness acutely and beginning to embrace it. The afternoon is fine and my neighbor’s mulberry tree beckons and it seems absolute folly to sit here much longer.

So. To make it quick: I have always felt myself to be The Weird Kid. I didn’t eat paste or anything, but I didn’t really speak to anyone either. Not if I could help it.

Right, I’ll just leave this here, since I can’t find one with my hair in Laura Ingalls braids and my astigmatic eyes hidden behind goofy spectacles. And big buck teeth sticking out.

I’ve gotten over my shyness for the most part, which does help in navigating life. I expect a certain awkwardness at parties, is all.

But sometimes today, people look at me funny, say when I’m picking mulberries or juneberries by the roadside, or when I’m down on my knees harvesting weeds for a salad. When someone gives me That Look, I want to say, “Honey, this is the least weird thing I do all day.”

I mean, I sit at my computer and string words together for little to no remuneration.

I move energy around with my hands.

I talk to trees and bugs and plants and streams.

I ground people for a living.

On occasion a client or friend will tell me something sensitive and then ask, anxiously, “Is that weird?”

I say, No. As someone whose whole body will jerk when some invisible energetic shift takes place, I’m uniquely qualified to judge, and no.

Or rather, possibly, but with me, you can be as weird as you are. To borrow a Martha Beck maxim.

To my tribe: Embrace the weird. In weird is our strength.

Now I’m off to fill my bucket with mulberries.

Puzzling

Posted on January 18, 2017 by Shawndra Miller

“A mystic is someone who has the suspicion that the brokenness, discord & discontinuities of everyday life conceal a hidden unity.”

~Rabbi Lawrence Kushner

What do you do when you have no roadmap to follow as you’re puzzling?

Friends posted this photo on Facebook, showing how far they’d gotten on a puzzle created from a map of the old homeplace. The box had no picture to guide their efforts.

A puzzle made from a map of home.

At the same time, Judy and I were working on this “jigsaw puzzle mystery” that came with a story and a mystery to solve. We didn’t realize until we began that the photograph on the box didn’t match the puzzle itself.

A mystery puzzle. (Spoiler: the solution to the mystery is an anachronistic cat in the cave painting.)

At first the mismatch was disorienting, then frustrating, then a good challenge. Looking at shapes and colors and piecing the thing together was a great exercise for my sometimes-too-wordy brain.

In Finding Your Way in a Wild New World, Martha Beck reframes problem-solving as “puzzle-cracking.” Conceiving of something as a serious problem immediately brings up rigidity and judgement—which shut down the imaginative flow needed to arrive at creative solutions.

Whether we’re looking at big societal problems (er, puzzles!) or humble homey ones, it’s the same: Play, not work, is key to the process, she says.

Also, a sense of the bigger picture that we may not see, but that we know we can add to, piece by piece, by aligning ourselves with what wants to be born into the world.

In a world of brokenness and discord, how do we map our way home before we can see “the big picture?” I think it comes down to trust that a picture will emerge.

Hiatus!

Posted on January 12, 2016 by Shawndra Miller

Time to make official what’s been in the works for a few ~~weeks~~ months now. I’m putting the blog on hiatus for at least the first quarter of 2016. It’s time to retool everything on my to-do list to align better with my current focus (or foci?).

In a nutshell: My work is moving more into the healing arts arena, while I continue to write nonfiction. In both of these areas, I’m part of an ever-growing “Team,” as author Martha Beck calls it—working to bring about a new Story of Connection.

Photo by Michael Lokner, via Flickr Creative Commons

I see energy work as a way to raise our collective vibration, which we need to do—at least if we’re going to birth a new and resilient future. So I’m getting certified in ThetaHealing, one of the energy techniques I practice.

Here is a workshop series I’m bringing to Indy in February. If you’re interested in joining me, which would be lovely, you can sign up at instructor Jean Shinners’ website.

I have a series of smaller workshops planned for the coming months in Indianapolis. The first one, Empath 101, will cover how manage being “so dang empathic,” as one of my empath friends puts it.

If you’d like to have a heads-up on these opportunities, or to learn more about my work, please sign up for my (revamped) e-newsletter.