“Happiness is the result of inner maturity.  It depends on us alone, and requires patient work, carried on from day to day.  Happiness must be built, and this requires time and effort.  In the long term, happiness and unhappiness are therefore a way of being, or a life skill.”   – Matthieu Ricard

 Am thinking we make life too complicated.  Maybe it’s just not that hard.  It is hard, of course, but sometimes I think we add to it.  I’m excellent at ruminating, so I would be speaking to myself here.  I’m remembering a conversation with a girlfriend when she was in her thirties.  She is upbeat, overcomes the obstacles she encounters in life with a great attitude and a lot of energy, and is very fun to watch.  She was also the victim of sexual abuse (incest, to be specific), growing up.  It is extremely difficult to get over sexual abuse, and perhaps especially for her as she felt she had broken up her family in the process of defending herself as a teenager.  My psychologist Aunt Linda told me one time that she can “get through” and “help” most everyone that she deals with, but that she has the most trouble getting through to sexual abuse victims.  Her comment was, “they cry, and they cry, and they cry”.   Not too long after hearing this I was with my girlfriend.  She said that sometimes she runs into other victims of sexual abuse and that they are always fairly astonished with her happiness in life.  She said, “They always ask me,  ‘HOW do you do it??’ ”  She tells them that it’s just like reminding yourself to sit up straight.  Whenever it comes back to her, she reminds herself that this does not define her, and that she is happy now.  Just like that.  As the British say, “Simples.”

Easy for me to say, I know, I mean I really know, because I was much more fortunate in life than to have to reckon with anything like this.  

But I still want to say it, for her, because it’s gold.

Do you dance?

When’s the last time you danced by yourself, say, in front of a mirror, with some great music and maybe a glass of wine or something?  Or while putting on makeup?   Or maybe you are able to turn the lights down?  Your favorite song?

What are you waiting for?

I’m surprised.  When I wrote about coping with the hard times in life I felt a little guilty.  I added the caption “not always, certainly…”  to a snap I took of my “Life is good” mug, challenging their ever positive way of thinking, which I normally pretty much buy into.  That’s why I have the mug.

I remember listening to my favorite priest when the boys were growing up.  Father Jack was admonishing us, telling us emphatically that an older, blind gentleman with a pretty, white seeing eye dog came in and sat in the front row every morning for the 7a.m. Mass.  The man was very grateful, and cheerful, and we with all of our sight, were supposed to emulate him.  We were to put our feet that we were so lucky to have on the floor every morning, use our legs that we were so lucky to get out of bed with, and begin our day of hearing with our ears, seeing with our eyes, and speaking with our voices. We were to be grateful every morning!

Well I do emulate this gentleman.  And of course I am grateful.  And I try not to get pulled into the dark side.  But then, there’s reality.  And somehow I feel a little relief by letting myself admit that life can suck sometimes, and sometimes it can suck greatly.  And that’s okay, because that’s just how it is, and how it goes.  What feels like the really great part is knowing when you’re in the great part.  I tell my husband to “Be  Zen” at these times. Better appreciate them.  (sing-song now, from the cartoon movie about dinosaurs, “Weee’rre  ba-a-a-ck)….   “They’re hee-ere”.

To me, it feels like a cycle.  I hang out with six very cool women, and have for more than twenty-three years now.  I notice that a couple of us are up, in really good places, while at the same time one or two of us are in really low, pretty lousy places, and the rest of us make up the middle ground.  And it all changes around as to who is where when.  We’ve been hanging out long enough to see cycles.

If I stop and acknowledge when I am in a rough cycle and try to relax in it, bummer though it is, instead of panicking my way through, it goes better.  Anthony deMello was a Catholic Jesuit Priest (1936-1987) who was raised in India, but spent most of his career here in the United States.  He was also a psychotherapist.  He is of the same order, Jesuit, as Pope Francis.  I don’t know any of the details about what is rumored to be his excommunication from the Catholic Church after he died, but it is said that he began teaching some of the philosophies of the eastern religions, considered out of synch with Catholic teachings.  I find his writings interesting.  If you want to take a peek you might check out his “Awareness Articles” on The deMello Spirituality Center website.

Anthony deMello’s brutal honesty about life shook me up when I started reading his stuff.  Right now I am remembering what he said about feeling depressed.  He said (super paraphrasing here) that we all go through it sometimes, and to acknowledge it, and just be with it, and that eventually it will pass.  I took that to mean don’t go getting all panicky about hard times, or about feeling down.  Someone said to me once to “find joy within my pain”.   I wasn’t sure how to do that.  But now I take the approach of, okay, life isn’t great, it isn’t what I would choose, but here I am.  I’ll entertain myself with whatever helps me feel good (the joy).  I will not spend time in my mind either questioning why I feel this way, or fighting to change it.  No use saying “Why me?”  Why me?  Because it’s my turn.  Life’s a cycle, and sometimes I’m not in the good part. Things will naturally change again.  They always do.

                Not always, certainly. . .

Quick question:
Where is the place you go to comfort yourself when you need it?  I’m not talking about turning to another person.  I mean when you have only yourself to turn to for the support that you need at a difficult time, or through a difficult period.  What would you turn to, and what would you do to make yourself feel better?

I know I’ve done a couple of things that feel kind of weird to admit, but they have both worked for me.  During one particularly lengthy and difficult time in my life I used to sit in candelight and listen to soft music on a chair in my bathroom.  The room was small and comfortable, and I thought a lot.  I, believe it or not, had a bunch of imaginary conversations with another person (I picked one), describing for them in detail what was going on and how I was feeling about it.  I described my day, I described my dilemma, and I shared my emotions.  I shared my tears sometimes, too, which was a helpful release.   I do the same “conversation with another person” type of thinking sometimes when life is feeling challenging and I’m jogging, which is a much less intense way of mulling things over.  When I admitted this to my psychologist aunt she told me that I had become my own best friend.  I liked the sound of that.

The other thing that helped me deal with hardship, (loss in particular), was playing some of the old television shows that brought me back to a really good place from my childhood.  My mother and I, usually with my dad reading in his La-Z-Boy in the corner and my sister and brother upstairs studying, used to watch television shows that she particularly enjoyed.  Ours was an ideal home, full of a calm and peaceful life with caring and rules and limits and love.  Sometimes we’d sit and watch two or three shows back to back. My mom would laugh at each of the different light hearted comedies at least once during each show.  It was really enjoyable.  It was pleasant and secure, and fun.

When my best best best friend in the world died four and a half years ago, my first thought was that I would stick my head in a book and come out when I felt the grief lifting, when the world felt okay again.  I went out and bought War and Peace, about the Napoleonic Wars and the French invasion of Russia, by Leo Tolstoy, because it is famous for its length, (1,273 pages in my edition), and I’m always up for a book that’s been around for a good long time (1869).  I found that I couldn’t focus on even one paragraph; not a single one.  I don’t know how many times I reread the first page of the book, and I couldn’t compute even a single word of it.  I never made it to the second page.  So I gave up after several evenings and instead turned to The Mary Tyler Moore Show (with Rhoda and Phyllis and all three of their fabulous and colorful wardrobes) and The Bob Newhart Show (the one with Emily and her darling floor length sun dresses and her corduroy midi skirts, where Bob is a psychologist before it was cool).  I turned them on, and while I couldn’t exactly laugh, I felt surrounded by a warm sense of comfort.

I’m just wondering if you have a plan, and a place?  Where’s your place?