Prayers for a broken country

Julian of Norwich was a contemplative and mystic who lived in the 14th century. It is thought that she was born on November 8, 1342 and lived until 1416, meaning she lived to be 74. She lived at a time when the Plague raged throughout Europe, when many people thought that the world would end, life was so terrible. But, after surviving a severe illness, she came to believe in the grace of God, and her writings are filled with amazing optimism. Here are some excerpts from her work Revelations of Divine Love:

“See that I am God. See that I am in everything. See that I do everything. See that I have never stopped ordering my works, nor ever shall, eternally. See that I lead everything on to the conclusion I ordained for it before time began, by the same power, wisdom and love with which I made it. How can anything be amiss?”

 “If there is anywhere on earth a lover of God who is always kept safe, I know nothing of it, for it was not shown to me. But this was shown: that in falling and rising again we are always kept in that same precious love.”

“He said not 'Thou shalt not be tempested, thou shalt not be travailed, thou shalt not be dis-eased'; but he said, 'Thou shalt not be overcome.”

"Grace transforms our failings full of dread into abundant, endless comfort … our failings full of shame into a noble, glorious rising … our dying full of sorrow into holy, blissful life. …. Just as our contrariness here on earth brings us pain, shame and sorrow, so grace brings us surpassing comfort, glory, and bliss in heaven … And that shall be a property of blessed love, that we shall know in God, which we might never have known without first experiencing woe.”

“All shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.”

Dear God, your family is divided. Some of us feel that darkness has come upon us, and are sad and afraid; others are joyful and see nothing but light and hope. We have been screaming at each other for months, and that seems unlikely to stop any time soon without your help. How can we put these feelings behind us and come together as a family? Please help us to find the resources to love and respect each other again.

Let us pray for our brother who is the newly-elected President, that he may govern our beautiful country with wisdom, tolerance, fairness and equanimity. Surround him with your grace and love.

Let us pray for our brother who is the current president, that he may be uplifted and sustained by your tender care through the last months of his presidency. Surround him with your grace and love.

Let us pray for our brothers and sisters who fear for their futures, who are sad and angry, that they will have the fortitude to look past current disappointment and loss to future contentment. We ask that you hold them in your infinite embrace and that they be graced with understanding and faith.

Let us pray for our brothers and sisters who are feeling optimistic and joyful, that their hopes for a better life will be fulfilled, and that they will be kind and considerate to those who are suffering. We ask that you surround them with the light of your love and grace them with understanding and charity.

Let us pray for our brothers and sisters who seek violent solutions, that their suffering may find expression in ways that are constructive and positive. Surround them with your grace and peace.

Let us pray for our brothers and sisters whose anger spills over into hatred and vengeance, that they may have their hearts turned toward mercy. Surround them with your grace and love.

Let us pray that the path forward will bestow your blessings of peace and joy and harmony on all of your human family.

May we be well. May we be happy. May we have ease of body and mind. May we be at peace.

May our family be well. May our family be happy. May our family have ease of body and mind. May our family be at peace.

May our leaders be well. May our leaders be happy. May our leaders have ease of body and mind. May our leaders be at peace.

May our country be well. May our country be happy. May our country have ease of body and mind. May our country be at peace.

May all beings be well. May all beings be happy. May all beings have ease of body and mind. May all beings be at peace.

Gut Wars - The Belly Awakens

My son, who for reasons of privacy I will refer to as Clifford, the Big Red Guy, has had an ongoing battle with the porcelain throne. He was, in fact, the Toilet Buster - Clifford never found a toilet he couldn't clog. Sporting a look of grim determination, he would enter the lavatory with a plunger, because he knew that the w.c. was no match for his awesome powers of blockage. Sometimes he would wield his weapon for many minutes until victory was his. All humor aside, this was a difficult situation for him, and for the rest of the household.

Clifford, being a young man, was loath to share his privy problems with his doting mom. But his obvious distress made me realize that some changes would have to be made if he were going to unclog his personal pipes. I began looking into the idea of adding a probiotic to his diet, since he had recently been on a bout of antibiotics for tonsil issues; it is well known that gut bacteria are crucial for overall health, including, possibly, mental health. I found one at the local natural pharmacy, and he was willing to try it. Clifford's diet, while relatively healthy for a young guy who gets at least some of his food supply from the local convenience store, seemed to be lacking in fiber; so a week or so after adding the probiotic, I suggested and he agreed to the introduction of smoothies into his diet, containing whey powder, banana, blueberry, spinach and flaxseed, plus whole organic milk. The smoothies were delicious, although he grumbled a bit about the spinach. We didn't have to wait long for the results.

After two weeks, Clifford not only had stopped clogging toilets, he had the opposite problem - a lot of disturbance in the abdominal force, shall we say - perhaps due to the introduction of a whole lotta fiber in a short period of time. We backed off on the smoothies, and his system began to re-regulate itself. So far, it seems, we have fixed the situation. The plunger sits, unused, in the corner of the lavatory. Clifford is continuing to take the probiotic. The best part is, all of this was accomplished without the use of medicine or laxatives and we know that if there is ever a Return of the Blockage Monster, we can use food as our weapon, and peace will reign in the gut again.

A legacy of peace

Epigenetics is a fascinating area of research which investigates whether or not the experiences of a parent or grandparent can literally affect the genetic inheritance of offspring. Experiments with mice have shown that the grandchildren of mice who were trained to fear a certain chemical by exposure to shocks and the smell of the chemical exhibited fear of the chemical smell without having had any similar conditioning. Descendants of the original mice also had physical brain changes in the areas that recognized the smell. Studies have shown that the descendants of populations subjected to difficult conditions during wartime are at increased risk for a number of diseases including heart disease and diabetes.

Studies have also shown that anxious parents can create anxious children, both by passing on genes for anxiety and by exhibiting behaviors that affect the way a child perceives the world. Other research points to the changes wrought in a child's genetic makeup by chronic stress experienced by the child's mother while pregnant. 

So, essentially, if you have bad things happen to you - a bad car accident, an assault, the death of a loved one, serious illness, natural catastrophe, whatever - or if you are in the military, or a firefighter, or a police officer who regularly encounters life-threatening situations - you and your descendants may very well become sicker and more fearful. And that sickness and fearfulness can be passed on to future descendants. But what can be done about this? We can't control our lives and the world so that bad things won't happen to us, although we like to think we can. What can we do to try and ward off some of the cascade of debilitation that is engendered by our suffering?

The only thing we can control is our reaction to the events around us.  We can seek peace in our outlook on life, in our interpretation of these events, and we can do this by cultivating a habit of mindfulness and meditation. Mindfulness has been shown to reduce anxiety and post-traumatic stress syndrome. It allows us to detach from our thinking; it can make us more resilient. We can interrupt our rumination about the past, which we cannot change, and our worrying about the future, which is unwritten, and spend more time in the present moment, enjoying whatever life is currently bringing us.

If we can become more resilient, so that we can better tolerate "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" then we can perhaps avoid the kind of epigenetic changes that could not only make us sicker, but could also haunt our children and their children. We woul be in a sense passing our resilience down to them.  And that is a legacy that anyone would wish for.

Who is renting the space in your head?

In my work as a wellness coach, I frequently hear clients talk about how they see themselves. "I am a failure", they will say, or "I am not good at..." and then go on to share a long list of perceived inadequacies, everything from social interaction to athleticism to artistic endeavor. "I am a fraud, a joke, a mistake" go some of the worse refrains in these songs of existential woe.

We all have this voice in our heads that tells us things like this. It is known as the inner critic, the voice that seems to consolidate all of the unpleasant things we have ever heard or thought about ourselves. It has a great memory, this inner critic; it never forgets a mistake we made or a slight we received, no matter how slight (see what I did there?) In the echo chamber in our brains, these words reverberate, becoming louder and more persistent the more we indulge them. A feedback loop develops, and eventually these hurtful words become our truth. In reality, if someone who rented a room from us talked to us like this, we would evict them!

There is a way to stop this process. By practicing mindfulness, paying attention to the present moment and noticing the thought process, we can observe these thoughts as they come through our consciousness (e.g. I am unattractive, no one will ever want me) and choose to let them go, going back to focusing on the sensations in the present moment - the blue of the sky, the smell of strawberries, the warm softness of the cat's fur. The patterns of thought that we habitually engage in become apparent; we start to notice how many of these critical thoughts we have. We get faster at recognizing them and letting them go, which robs them of their power. They are just thoughts, after all, and thoughts aren't facts. We can choose to be in the moment, where we can experience all of the wonder and beauty around us.

Put your own mask on first

I chose the title of this post with the understanding that the phrase could be taken several different ways. Much could be said about the masks we all wear to some degree in public. Perhaps you, dear reader, immediately began thinking about your own mask, and how it might differ from "the real you". That would be an interesting road to go down, but not the one I will travel today.

I began the day as I usually do, by getting up and coming downstairs to the kitchen. My son was sleeping as usual on the sofa. He is supposed to go to work today, and needs help to get going, so I automatically went to the coffee maker to prepare a cup of coffee for him; then the phrase "put your own mask on first" came unbidden into my head. Any air traveler has heard this phrase many times; during the safety instruction before flight, when the flight attendant addresses an oxygen emergency: "Masks will descend; please affix your own mask before placing masks on those in your care" or words to that effect. I realized that I needed a cup of coffee as much as he did, and fixed my cup first.

When we care for others, it is tempting to forget ourselves, or forgo our own comfort, and focus on the needs of the other, especially when the needs are great. But by neglecting to care for ourselves first, we make ourselves vulnerable to depletion by exhaustion, lack of nutrition, lack of proper exercise, lack of spiritual self-care. We are as much in need of compassion and care as those we care for. Self-compassion is not a sign of narcissism; it is vital for caregivers, and indeed anyone who has relationships that need cultivating and tending, to stay healthy so that we may extend that compassion to others. If we become too selfless, we lose ourselves, and that doesn't help anyone. By exercising self-compassion, by putting our own masks on first, we can maintain the strength and composure that we need to meet the challenges we face.

Letting the garden be

There is a great deal to be said for sitting at a window every day. My laptop is positioned so that I can look out on my front lawn, bisected as it is by a stone wall that creates an embankment for my neighbors' driveway. Currently, the lawn, with semicircular garden, narrow strip of grass and lichen-covered bench fronting the wall, is a mass of weeds and wildflowers of many different kinds, some of which I recognize; for example, there are many violets abloom. Who knew that they could spread like this? They do not seem to deserve the sobriquet "shrinking violet", they are quite assertive.

The garden is a profusion of weeds due to the fact that it has been raining pretty much every day for a week. I have watched the weeds celebrate their existence by spreading over just about every inch of soil, unchecked by the violence I would have wrought upon them if it weren't so darn wet. So, I have been watching the rise of a garden populated by weeds, and wildflowers. The tulips I planted last fall, those that survived midnight raids by squirrels and deer, have been reduced to headless stalks. Gladioli and phlox, French lavender, and coneflowers have yet to make their appearance. And yet the garden is lush and green, and birds come and root through the motley vegetation  for last year's seeds, and bits of dried grass for nests. The birds see no problem at all with what is growing there. Sometimes a mockingbird will hop from the yew bush next to the window up to my window sill, and engage with me in mutual regard.

Mindfulness has taught me to look at the weeds, and grass, and birds, and appreciate them for what they are - examples of nature renewing itself, of life going about its daily routine. The scenery changes every day, if ever so slightly. I am grateful that I have such beauty to look at.  Of course, one of these days it will stop raining, and I will go out there and pull some of the ground-cover that is spreading, and dig up the violets, and plant pansies, or petunias, or zinnias. But for this week, I have been enjoying what is there, noticing and letting be the beauty that is there to be seen, every day, every day.