Tag: meditation

Buddhism, Family, Marriage, Meditation, Mindfulness, Parenting, Special Needs, Uncategorized

Acceptance is not giving up..

Posted on by kosanford

Very early on right after Mae was diagnosed I had a constant and overwhelming desire to try and fix Autism.  I was convinced that there would be a doctor, a supplement, a therapy that would unlock the words from my child’s mouth.  We traveled from New York to Boston consulting every expert we could. We tried every combination of nutrients and foods imaginable.  Every conversation, every thought was consumed by the need for answers.  I struggled at the time to reconcile this endless search with my Buddhist studies.  Those studies told me to live in the moment, to be present with whatever arises, to learn to love what was right in front of me.  I wasn’t sure how to align the need to have answers about my child’s condition and my belief that honest and loving acceptance of what is in front of you is the best way to live.  

 

We don’t really understand acceptance in Western culture.  Or at least I didn’t.  I felt like accepting my daughter’s diagnosis was a kind of capitulation.  Acceptance felt like giving up, so I resisted it.  We spent every penny we had. We turned every meal into a therapeutic endeavor. We sued our school district so she could go to private school. We watched her like hawks waiting for evidence of improvement. Our sense of wellbeing was entirely wrapped up in whether or not Mae had a good day or a bad day, on whether or not she was “improving.”

 

After almost two years of battling with an enemy of our own making we couldn’t do it anymore.  We had no more money for therapies. We were tired of meals whose success hinged on whether or not she sat and used a fork. We just wanted to enjoy our family again.  So we stopped. Instead of trying to solve the “problem,” we worked on accepting our daughter for who she was.  She stopped being a diagnosis and became our daughter again.  It doesn’t mean we don’t work to make sure her life is filled with activities and people who nurture and care for her, or that we don’t high five her when she joins us at the table, or demand that she use her limited language skills whenever possible. We do all those things.  It also doesn’t mean that I don’t occasionally get sad about the things she could be doing this summer if her brain were wired just a bit differently.  I would be lying if I said I never think about it.

 

In our case, acceptance was not capitulation. It was actually a very conscious and loving gesture towards both ourselves and our child.  Learning to accept her diagnosis and what it meant both for her and for us as a family liberated us from our own expectations.  I have found that the more willing we are to accept the truth of difficult situations the more easily we can adapt to them.  When we resisted the hard truths of Mae’s diagnosis by insisting we could fix it we were blind to what was really in front of us, which was a beautiful little girl with a twinkly smile and an awful lot to teach us.

Buddhism, Family, Marriage, Meditation, Mindfulness, Parenting, Yoga

By Any Means Necessary

Posted on by kosanford

As school vacation ended this past week, I was desperate for my children to go back to school.  When we have all been in the house for a little too long there is an itchy, restless feeling around the edges of everything they do.  In my body it manifests as massive fatigue. When they were all home it felt like a huge effort to do anything, the second they left I found myself energized and able to address my to-do list.  

I don’t like that itchy, cranky feeling, it feels like a lack of gratitude.  Sitting in my warm safe house with my three kids and my loving husband and feeling unsatisfied seems fundamentally wrong.  I know I only feel this way because I am desperate for us to return to the routine that comes with school and work.  Even knowing that, I search for an antidote, I remind myself how lucky I am, I sit for meditation, or go for a run.  Truly there is only one thing that really helps, and for me it is reflecting on the alternative.

Last New Year’s, Colin wasn’t feeling well.  He was tired, stressed and his back hurt.  In fairness, we are both tired and have been since Ben appeared in 2004, so when he complained of exhaustion, I ignored it.  When he talked about his back hurting I told him to stretch, put your legs up the wall and breathe deeply.  When he said he was going to see a doctor, I shrugged.  The doctor ran a million tests and they were all inconclusive. Colin’s face  was slowly turning gray but I couldn’t see it.  I was too busy thinking about the details of our life.  The kids’ schools, our leaky roof, our muddy driveway, my own aches, pains and frustrations.  I was so engaged in our day-to-day that I wasn’t able to see that my husband was fading away.  Or maybe I didn’t want to see it.

In February he had an angiogram, and they found and cleared a significant blockage, one they call the “widow-maker.” At the time I just focused on how lucky we were. I heaped praise on Colin for seeking out a second opinion. I talked about the miracles of medicine and joked that he had eaten his last cheeseburger.  We have a habit in our family of turning difficult realities into punchlines and this was no different.  He would joke that with his new “gear” as we referred to the stent that he was like a newborn; he could throw himself into bad habits with gusto.  I would feign horror, knowing that we would find some easy middle ground.

It wasn’t until the end of this year that I really thought about how differently the story could have ended.  There are many skilled practitioners of Buddhism who can find gratitude without thinking of what could have gone wrong.  I am not one of them.  As 2015 ended, I found myself thinking more and more about what could have happened, about my life without Colin.  Not just the practical financial aspects, which would be grim at best, but also the impossible loneliness I would feel in his absence.  When I find myself irritated by the hundreds of water glasses he manages to use and leave behind in a day, or the peanut butter with a knife sticking out left on the counter after lunch, or the fact he never quite remembers to close the fridge….  When I see those things and start to think to myself “what the ????” I think about the other ending we could have had to 2015, the ending where my husband got so gray that he disappeared altogether.  When I think about that I don’t even see the water glasses or the peanut butter.

One of my favorite phrases in Buddhism is “skillful means.”  It is used to describe the many different methods available to people as they search for truth.  The longer you practice, the more clear and efficient your means become.  It isn’t especially skillful to appreciate the life you have by imagining the worst case scenario.  But for now it’s what i am working with.  I cannot seem to learn the lesson enough times that the real treasures are hidden in the most ordinary days.

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Buddhism, Family, Meditation, Mindfulness, Parenting, Yoga

It’s not really a superpower

Posted on by kosanford

Last weekend, I was talking to a friend about yoga and meditation and she told me she didn’t feel like she was good at either because she could never “clear her mind.”  It is a fact that we all believe that we are the proud owner of the world’s busiest mind.  Every one of us is convinced that no one’s head or life is as busy as our own.  However, “clearing one’s mind” is a common, but impossible directive.

In a yoga practice, one’s attention should be primarily with the breath, and then, with where one’s body is in space.  When you look down at your feet and see that you desperately need a pedicure, note it.  But, you can’t do anything about it in the middle of a yoga class so go back to your breath. It is not about “clearing one’s mind” at all, it is about returning your attention to where your body is, neither in the future or the past but right there on your mat.

The same is true with meditation.  There is no better way to bring your “to-do” list front and center than to try and not to think about it.  In meditation, we try to just watch our thoughts. Knowing that we are safely seated somewhere, we can just observe our chaotic mind, as if we were at the top of a tall building looking down on a busy street.  If you find yourself so swept up in a thought or fantasy that you are no longer in the present moment, you are either in an imaginary future or a completed past.  

When we meditate we are actively watching our thoughts and when they move away from the present moment we notice it by labeling it “thinking” and then return our attention to the present moment.  It may be that the labeling “thinking” has made students believe that they should not be thinking, that they are chasing a state of thoughtless bliss.  This is not the case at all.  Thinking in and of itself is not a bad thing.  Meditation is an opportunity to sit quietly and pay attention to the direction your mind is going.  Can you gently steer your mind and attention back to the present? When you notice your mind has wandered, label it “thinking” and return your attention to your breath, or the sound of your feet as you walk, or your body in the water as you swim.  We are practicing paying attention, which doesn’t involve having no thoughts. It means investing all our attention in what we are doing.

Just as we can place our feet on our mats, or sit on a cushion, we can also learn to place our attention where our body is, and try and develop some clarity about where our mind is going.  If your habit is to put your body somewhere and let your mind race anxiously into the future or lope around in the past, then ask yourself if that is really serving you. Isn’t it better to try and keep our attention in the one place where we can actually effect change, which is the present moment?

Whether you are practicing yoga, going for a walk, or eating a meal, see if you can’t try to keep your attention on what you are doing, or at least notice when it has shifted and bring it back.  It’s valuable to have clarity about where our thoughts go, but clarity is not developed by pushing our thoughts into some sort of corner where we pretend to ignore them in search of a “clear mind.” Clarity comes from watching our thoughts with a generous and loving attitude towards ourselves and making every effort to let go of anything that doesn’t serve us.  

It’s easier said than done, but like anything, it’s a habit we can develop, not a superpower that’s out of our reach.

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Buddhism, Meditation, Mindfulness, Parenting, Yoga

Nothing interesting happens…

Posted on by kosanford

I have this battered green spiral notebook that I have used for all my teacher trainings and meditation retreats. It is in many ways my spiritual brain. It sits on the bookshelf next to my desk and I pull it out periodically when I am feeling stuck. Every yoga sequence I have ever really loved is scrawled into it, as well as bits of wisdom from all the teachers I have worked with. At one point, Peter got his hands on it and covered a few pages with some construction vehicle stickers and elaborate drawings of rocks. He must have been about three when that happened.

Today while leafing through it a phrase that I had scrawled in the margin caught my eye. In my barely legible script it read “nothing interesting happens in your comfort zone.” I have been turning the phrase over in mind ever since.

I wondered about the context of the phrase. I bet it was in the spirit of encouraging yoga students to push themselves a bit. To try something new and surprise themselves. Or was it part of a meditation training, a nudge to connect with our students in a more meaningful way. Did someone else say it, or had it occurred to me? The rest of the page is blank, so I don’t know how that phrase ended up in the margin, a footnote on a blank page. It made me think of Ben off to middle school and pushed out of his comfort zone whether he likes it or not.

All of childhood seems to have built into it this concept of constant change. Even my children’s bodies are forever stretching and growing, their comfort zone as challenged as their pants to keep up with the endless transformation of their limbs and identities.

I feel a little envious of how, within my children’s lives,there is the built-in expectation that they will grow and change, the idea that a comfort zone is more of a launchpad and less of a trap. I would like to think of my own comfort zone that way, a safe starting point for unlimited potential. As adults our lives and habits can easily become fortresses Old relationships and safe places keep us from building new connections and stretching ourselves. We retreat to the familiar, the safe, the stable. These things are not inherently bad; we all need a strong foundation. Ideally, it should be one that supports us enough that we can safely test the edges of where we are comfortable.

You don’t have to jump out of airplanes, or start middle school to challenge your comfort zone. It can be as simple as smiling at a stranger, picking up a new book, letting go of an old resentment. We hold on to all sorts of ideas, places and things because we think we need them to feel safe. When we hold on to them too tightly they become walls that keep new ideas and new information out. It is only when we are open to peeking around the edges of our life that we will turn our comfort zone into a launchpad rather than a stop sign.

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Family, Marriage, Meditation, Parenting, Yoga

You can always change the station….

Posted on by kosanford

This weekend, after our new kitchen rose to the occasion in a huge way, churning out meals and snacks for our whole family, I felt so full (literally and figuratively) and happy.  Being all gathered together in our new house felt exactly as I had hoped it would.  The sweet spot that lies between abundance and excess. On Saturday after the festivities wound down, I headed to a daylong yoga and meditation retreat. The day itself was grey and rainy and it felt so good to know that I would spend it quietly on my mat with no greater task than to listen.

 

There is nothing I love more than gathering with family and friends but I have learned that to do it well, I need to build in some quiet time on the back end. I can be completely present to those I love if I can practice that silently on my own. Too much silence and I get a little wacky; not enough, and I get even wackier.  Like anything else, I need balance between external merriment and a quiet internal landscape.

 

The workshop was great, a duet between two smart teachers. They skillfully wove yoga, meditation and dharma talks in such a way that at the end of the day, I was ready to go home because I was satisfied, neither stuffed or restless. Like a well-made meal, a workshop should be a good blend of spices and portions; too much and it’s like drinking from a fire hose, too little and you are left feeling empty.

 

During one of the meditations, our teacher Wes Nisker suggested that we view self-criticism as a misguided form of self-care; the idea that the internal voice that releases a steady stream of worries, critique and doubts is actually trying to help you. I thought this was a brilliant shift in perspective on that particular characteristic we all share. My favorite writer, Annie Lamott, calls the self criticism station in her head “k-fucked” radio. It’s the voice that makes it hard to try new things, or is convinced that at any moment everyone is going to find out you are a fraud and it’s curtains. We all have it, and for some people it’s louder than others. Learning to see it as a form of self care seems to make it easier to reconcile it. Rather than resent it, or try and control it, I love the idea of seeing it as a misguided form of self preservation. By thinking of it this way, it seems easier to shake it off. When some familiar worry or self doubt pops up it seems easier to smile and ignore it rather than feel like, “seriously, you again? Get lost..” Instead it becomes a worried, well meaning friend who can’t help themselves. You smile at their efforts and don’t listen to their advice.


We do ourselves no favors worrying about what could go wrong. Instead, we should be focusing our energies and attention on what is actually happening. Like so many things, it’s way harder than it sounds. But, maybe learning to see “k-fucked radio” as just one of our many channels, we will see that we can always change the station.

Meditation, running, Special Needs

Synchronicity as a practice….

Posted on by kosanford

“Sanity comes from a sense of being synchronized within ourselves.”

Irini Rockwell

 

I came across this sentence and felt like it really captured everything that I have come to believe about finding balance in life.  I think everyone has had the experience of being out of sync with ourselves.  Sometimes it is as simple as agreeing to lunch with someone when you don’t really want to, or endorsing an idea you have misgivings about.  Other times it is more complicated: it can be time to change jobs, or end a relationship but inertia keeps you stuck in place.

 

There are millions of suggestions and avenues for creating synchronicity between our internal and external lives.  For me it is a combination of yoga, meditation, and running that provide the space to make sure I am not moving too far from the center.  For someone else, it may be swimming, walking their dog or writing.  We all need something, some sort of barometer of our own wellness.  Without a quiet center built into our lives we can find ourselves distracted by every shiny object or tragedy that life has to offer.

 

When I look at my daughter I am so aware that so many of her issues arise from the fact that it is almost impossible for her to be in sync with the world around her.  This morning she woke up and came running out to the kitchen table where I was sitting quietly, lights dimmed, listening to classical music and having coffee, she let out a growl of delight at the sight of me and jumped up on the bench where I was sitting and started clapping and laughing….it was 6 am. Mae is clinically not aware of the cues around her; being quiet in a library, joyous on her birthday, or patient in a long line, are all possible only if she is in the mood.  What the world wants, is not her concern, but for her that’s normal.  It also doesn’t bother her especially if she has bounded into my quiet morning like a freight train.  She doesn’t do guilt.  She is autistic.

 

For most of us though, we are aware when we are out of sync with ourselves or our world but not always sure how to fix it.  We can acknowledge it; we can say “I am working too much” or “I am working too little,” or “I am tired, sad or depressed.”  Being aware of it is an important step.  The next step is to  define what feeling in sync is for yourself.  We must be clear on what we think balance is, before we can head in that direction.  No matter what avenue you take this requires honest, and loving self reflection. I say honest because sometimes we get confused by what we think sanity looks like, and what it really looks like for each of us.  That serene woman in front of me in a yoga class may be sane, but I can’t be her, so I have to think about what serenity would look like in my life not my fantasy version of hers.


I am always interested in how to make things a practice, so I made a list of the areas in my life where I feel out of sync.  Some are big; am I professionally fulfilled and does it matter? And some are small: it bothers me that there is a cord hanging out of the family room ceiling.  Obviously, one of these things has an easy answer and the other doesn’t.  The point is not to have all the answers.  It is more to identify the questions, and then create some sort of framework to bring things back into alignment with each other.  The first part of the practice is creating the questions and the second part is moving to address them in practical ways.  Just engaging in the thinking process about balance seems to make me more balanced.  Almost always it is the effort not the outcome that has value.

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Family, Marriage, Meditation, Parenting, Special Needs, Yoga

Love is not a limited resource…..

Posted on by kosanford

One of my earliest memories is of  standing in the grocery store with my mother and looking at a total stranger, keeping my eyes on them until I felt like I loved them as much as my parents.  I remember playing this game in stores, restaurants, and on the highway, staring at strangers until I felt the sensations that I associated with love.  A feeling of warmth in my chest, a kind of tingling in my arms and hands, a sense of connection even though the person wasn’t someone I knew at all.  I guess from a very early age I was interested in how my mind could influence or create sensation in my body.

 

What I didn’t realize was that I was practicing my own form of a Loving Kindness meditation. Love is a virtually unlimited resource, it is what gets us up in the morning; it is what sustains us through our darkest hours and lifts us to our greatest joys.  In my own life I define love as a sense of connection and a generosity of spirit that makes me feel safe and expansive at the same time.  Sometimes when life is busy, or we are feeling run down, that sense of connection to others can feel out of reach.  Practicing a Loving Kindness meditation for just a few minutes a day can shift our whole sense of what interdependence feels like.  The formal practice of this meditation requires you to find a quiet place, and sit with eyes open or closed.  Start by visualizing someone who you love unconditionally.  Focus on the image of that person in your mind’s eye until you can feel the sensation in the body that you associate with love.  Often you will find that you are smiling.  You will send that person the message:

May you be happy

May you be healthy

May you be safe

May you be at ease

Repeat these phrases in your head a few times as you hold that image of your beloved person in your mind. Then the practice dictates replacing the image of that person with an image of yourself and sending yourself these very same messages.  From yourself you move to an acquaintance and eventually to someone with whom you have conflict.  Each time you repeat the same phrases, sending these messages of love and generosity out into the world.  The very last part of the practice is sending these messages universally in the hopes that they reach all who need them.

The formal practice of Loving Kindness meditation is intensely powerful, and I encourage everyone to explore it. Recently, I have found myself returning to my own made-up version of it from childhood. Practicing not in a quiet room away from the world but instead in the hardware store, or the library, focusing my attention on someone (usually their back, so it isn’t weird) until I can feel a sense of loving them.  There is something about this practice that makes me happy, that makes me feel like I have tapped into an amazing source of good feeling that exists all the time.  Whether it is practiced formally or informally, working to spread love and kindness in today’s busy, intensely complicated world seems like an awfully good use of one’s time

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Family, Marriage, Meditation

On any given day……..

Posted on by kosanford

mae every dayI have a very dear friend who lost both her father and beloved uncle in a very short period of time.  For years afterwards, when she was talking about any situation that was disappointing or inspired any feelings of sadness, she would start the sentence by saying, “I know no one is dead but…”  It was as if after the immense pain and trauma of the initial loss she felt she was never entitled to feel sad again.  I understand this; in the years since Mae’s diagnosis, the tsunami of disappointment and sadness that we wrestled with made any daily disappointments seem trivial.  For a long time I would fail to even register irritation of any kind, even when I started to return to myself.  I would dismiss annoyances by reminding myself that I had a child with Autism, and therefore this broken car mirror, or internet that won’t work, or any number of other minor bothers weren’t worth my time.

In some ways, though, this is problematic. After my wedding, a very joyful day, I didn’t imagine that I would never feel equal happiness again.  Nor did I compare everyday moments of contentment to the major rush of happiness that accompanied our wedding.  Imagine if after a long, delightful day at the beach with our family I turned to Colin and said, “Well that was fun. I am happy —  I mean not like wedding happy — but happy.” I am not sure he would feel like it was a positive assessment.

We don’t wear our happy experiences like armor to protect us from future happiness, so why do we feel that our painful experiences should protect us from future discomfort?  There is no amount of perspective that will make you immune to the ups and downs of an ordinary life.  Every day is filled with opportunities to feel virtually every emotion available.  In any given hour, I can have my feelings hurt, I can laugh, I can be embarassed, I can be in love.  That can go on all the time every day. It’s exhausting just thinking about it.

I think that perspective is only valuable if it doesn’t prevent you from really feeling everything, both good and bad.  It is okay to be annoyed even if it is just because your pedicure was smudged.  I can also be inordinately happy when Mae’s very expensive almond milk yogurts are on sale.  Yesterday, I was practically giddy because while I was walking the dog she expertly pooped in a mouse hole of some sort, which meant I did not have to bag it and carry it home.  It was thrilling.  I decided the dog was a genius, and my days of picking up poop were over. By the time I got home I had forgotten about it completely because I noticed that the molding under the door was loose and I was immediately absorbed in how to fix it.

It is unfortunate that we can never be inoculated against sadness, embarrassment or irritation. There is no quota on disappointment in life, some have more, some have less.  By the same token we have endless opportunities for joy; there is no limit on what can bring a smile to your face even in the darkest of moments.  I am grateful for the perspective that being a special needs parent has given me, I am empowered by it.  I never wonder what I am made of and that is a very good feeling.  At the same time, I have to remember that just because I have perspective doesn’t mean I should deny or ignore the ordinary bumps that come up in a day.  Some days are great: you get married, you have babies, you see old friends. Some moments are great: you laugh hard, your daughter speaks, your children are swimming together, your dog poops in a hole.  Some days are awful: your daughter is sick, you have crazy medical bills, your car won’t start, you have hurt the feelings of someone you love…Sometimes it can all happen in the same day, because life is like that. Just the way we would never say that a balanced meal is made up entirely of desserts a balanced life is filled with every emotion.  The important thing is to allow yourself to really feel, to really connect to the life that you are having, because up or down, it is the one you have.

 

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Meditation, Parenting, Special Needs, Uncategorized, Yoga

It doesn’t just happen….

Posted on by kosanford
Buddha courtesy of www.lotussculpture.com
Buddha courtesy of http://www.lotussculpture.com

In her book A Heart as Wide as the World Sharon Salzberg describes “effort” as the “unconstrained willingness to persevere through difficulty.” She goes on to say, “Effort is the willingness to open where we have been closed, to come close to what we have avoided, to be patient with ourselves, to let go of preconceptions.”

I love the phrase “unconstrained willingness to persevere.”  I think for many of us in our lives we are many things to so many people and we have taken on many different kinds of tasks.  Sometimes a kind of automatic pilot can kick in.   We understand how to make our lives work and so we move forward, effortlessly. There is nothing wrong with being good at what you do, or having an established work or parenting pattern.  But when something is effortless, are you connected to it? In yoga when we teach the very first pose, Tadasana, people will almost always say “you mean I just stand here?”  The answer is “sort of.”  If you are really thinking, however, about your balance and engaging the muscles of your legs and the position of your spine and shoulders you will find that it takes effort.  You will even start to build some heat in your body, it is important to figure out the alignment in that first standing pose because it will be relevant to every other pose you do, including even the fanciest of arm balances.

The same is true in our lives.  If we construct our lives in such a way that they require very little focused effort, we start to feel disconnected from ourselves and the people and things we care about most. One of the reasons I believe that having a special needs child has been an incredible gift is that her unpredictability and the effort it takes to be her parent mean that I can never really slide towards autopilot.  She is the ultimate reminder to wake up and pay attention because life is happening, and of course if you take your eyes off her for a minute she is hanging from the rafters…..So that is motivation to stay present.

The word “unconstrained” is perfect to describe the effort we should put into our lives and relationships.  It implies that unlimited potential is possible if we let ourselves live fully.  We all have lists of things in our heads that we would like to do. They don’t have to be lofty. They can be as mundane as cleaning the kitchen or as vast as enlightenment for all beings.  They both take effort, attention and mindfulness. It is tempting when we meet people we admire, such as great teachers, writers or artists, to imagine that they were born with skills we were not.  It is true that someone who is destined to be seven feet tall because of their genetics is more likely to play professional basketball than someone who never makes it to six feet.  However, there is enormous effort, and concentration that goes into being an athlete even if one is born with some of the cards stacked in your favor.  When I have met great meditation and yoga teachers, I am always amazed and maybe a little envious of what they know and how easily they seem to convey their knowledge.  What it is important to remember is that this wisdom took effort and discipline. It took focus and perseverance. Wishing for knowledge or clarity but not undertaking the learning is like wishing to be in the NBA and never picking up a basketball.

Right Effort is part of the Buddha’s Eightfold Noble Path.  It is the fundamental belief that it takes effort to wake up to the full awareness available to us all.  In my mind it is the difference between being able to drive a car so spaced out that I don’t even notice that I have been listening to commercials, and driving a car with full attention to what I hear, what I see and what I am doing.  From the outside both experiences are identical, but inside they are completely different  Yoga and meditation are two ways we can practice mindfulness and attention, but any activity can become a mindfulness exercise.  It just takes effort and perseverance and the unconstrained willingness to believe that every moment is an opportunity to practice being awake.  It is this practice, this effort of returning our attention repeatedly to where we are and what we are doing, that will help us realize that we have everything we need for real sustainable, wakeful joy.

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Family, Marriage, Meditation, Parenting

Grateful for champagne problems

Posted on by kosanford

photo (11)My new favorite phrase is “champagne problems.”  A friend of mine used it recently to describe the intense angst that people she knew were experiencing about their bright, healthy, normal kids not getting into competitive private schools.  We both have special needs kids and would like very much to have our greatest fear about our children be that they won’t get into a top tier college.

Yesterday, in the middle of a beautiful day, I found myself with a free hour.  I decided to sit outside and read my brother’s book.  First the Fed Ex guy came, then a garden crew showed up at the house next door, the the propane guy came to fill the tank.  Each interruption made me more irritated.  I was feeling cheated out of my quiet hour in the sun.  As my blood pressure started to rise I began to feel sorry for myself that my one quiet hour of the day was being ruined, I heard the phrase champagne problems in my head and had to laugh.

Sometimes it’s important to have champagne problems.  I can’t walk around all the time thinking about world hunger, climate change, or what will happen in my own future and that of those I love.  I am not sure how much fun I would be having if I walked around all the time intensely focused on all my fears.  We should be mindful of the realities of our life, and of the greater world.  We should live in a way that aligns with our values: recycle, be kind to others, do your best, but also give yourself a break.

Trouble arises when we can’t tell the difference between champagne problems and genuine heartbreak.  We all struggle with real problems and real insecurities, but it’s easy to distract ourselves with superficial ones.  Perspective is being able to separate an irritation from a crisis. Sometimes it is hard to tell the difference because our bodies respond to them similarly.

The gritting of teeth, the tightness of shoulders and the elevated heart rate are the body’s way of sensing and dealing with danger.  The trouble is that a driver in front of you going slowly, or a quiet afternoon being ruined by noise are not danger.  They are irritations or champagne problems.

I am learning that I need to spend some time each week on a walk or a run reflecting on how I am responding to the unexpected ups and downs in my life.  If we aren’t careful we can form habits that turn everything into a calamity when really very few things are. A champagne problem is one that I can catch and release quickly, I can be disappointed or irritated for a few minutes and then let it go.  I know I need to conserve my emotional resources for the moments that matter both good and bad, because life is certainly filled with both.

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