Tag: monkey mind

Simplify: Who, me?

by Karen, posted in education, local fun, the beach, writing

IMG_4542I went to a class at the Wells Public Library this week. Lisa Luken of Simple Joy Living, LLC spoke to us about simplifying our lives by streamlining (as well as getting rid of) our stuff. Her tagline is “Simple. Joyful. Organized. Intentional. Living.”

Great, right? Who wouldn’t want that?

I had a ton of ideas fill my monkey-mind within the first fifteen minutes of Lisa’s talk. Some were related to organizing my clutter and some were about…other things. Still, they were GOOD IDEAS! There’s something about the energy of a group that can stimulate thought processes that lie dormant when one is home. You know. Sitting on the couch. Eating ice cream. Watching The Good Wife.

I returned home with renewed enthusiasm to rid my home of clutter. I bagged stuff up. In this case, it was mostly books. And then, some escaped! Two of them went back to their original places on the bookshelf when I wasn’t paying attention!

Not good. I have to do better. Because, as Lisa pointed out, if I am not home dusting, rearranging, storing, and otherwise picking-up-and-putting-down my clutter, I could be doing something that I really love to do. Like going to the ocean. Or walking the labyrinth at The LoveLight Center. Or revising my second novel (working title: How to Stay Married in Midlife).

Or, you know. Sitting on the couch. Eating ice cream. Watching The Good Wife.

🙂

Gratitude

by Karen, posted in books, family, friends, Midlife Crisis, no fear, Turning 50

Gratitude Journal~Sarah Ban BreathnachI passed by the TV in the common area at work and they were interviewing someone or other (I am guessing it was Gretchen Rubin) who was talking about how important it is to write down things for which you are grateful. Further, if you take the time to write a gratitude list, you will be happier.

If they say it on The Today Show, it must be true, right?

I am no stranger to the gratitude list. I have twice in years past kept an official Gratitude Journal. I faithfully (well, usually) wrote down 5 things every day for which I was grateful. I thought about doing it this year, too. . . and that’s all I did. I thought about it, then it went the way of so many of my great thoughts…just completely disappeared from my head until I saw this post’s title that I started a week ago and forgot about (hello, midlife monkey mind).

I know what stopped me: I didn’t buy The Gratitude Journal and so therefore I could not record my gratefulness! Then I stumbled upon this site:

The Simple Abundance online Gratitude Journal

Yay! Excuses begone! I am taking the plunge with the online journal. I don’t think a day goes by that I am not on the computer for something (email, Facebook) so it should be easy, right?

Right?

Here’s today’s:

January 12, 2013
1 Spicy Eggnog Coffee
2. Sleeping until I wake up without the alarm
3. No appointments
4. My family and friends
5. My new job

You don’t have to pay to sign up if you don’t want to. Just type into the feature, then cut and paste it to a folder on your desktop.

I’m feeling happier already!

Midlife Monkey Mind

by Karen, posted in Angels, education, Midlife Crisis, Turning 50, yoga

I’ve been on overload these past few weeks, with my mind overly full of stress-inducing thoughts. Sleeping has been a challenge. Lying awake from 1:30-4:30am two nights ago, I trotted out all my tricks for putting myself back to sleep: saying my ABC’s, counting backward from 100, tensing and relaxing muscle groups, saying the So Hum meditation.

Today at yoga, the instructor coincidentally included the So Hum mediation in our class. My mind had been racing a mile a minute right up until I heard Kristen say those two words, when it screeched to a halt…for a second. I started saying the words: so hum…so hum…so hum…

Then I became aware of something interesting: although my mental voice was indeed repeating the so hums dutifully as requested, another channel in my mind was still gyrating with the monkey mindedness of my midlife brain. It never stopped. Even as my ‘good girl’ brain was desperately trying to fulfill the teacher’s request to meditate on the fact that “I am”, the ‘bad girl’ brain carried on obsessing with wild abandon.

Note to self: shut of the monkey mind when you meditate. It’s so much more effective.

Mother’s monkey mind

by Karen, posted in family, Holidays, Midlife Crisis, relationships, tweens

On a recent episode of The Middle, the mom Frankie got it wrong. For mother’s day, she thought she wanted the entire day to herself, free of husband and children, to do whatever she wanted to. This was a classic episode of “be careful what you wish for” because all she managed to do that day was fix things that were broken, defrosting things that were frozen, clean things that were dirty. By the time she finally sat down on the couch with her magazine and her baked goods, the fam came home.  The day was over. Frankie was bereft.

Frankie got it wrong because having the whole day off when you never have the whole day to yourself is just too overwhelming to be fully appreciated without some advance planning. She was not given enough notice and did not give the day enough forethought to do it right. I am completely familiar with this phenomenon. I routinely screw up unscheduled blocks of time that I unexpectedly have to myself because…because there are just so many things that I want to do that I don’t have the time for in everyday, workaday life!


Have the gift of an unscheduled block of time? Enter the monkey mind, and all can be lost in a heartbeat. This monkey mind mayhem can be wreaked on any special day, not just Mother’s Day. Just thinking about all of the things I want to do: read? Write? Knit? Practice a little yoga? Bake a batch of cupcakes/brownies/cookies? Work in the garden? Sometimes it becomes like diagnosing an illness: a ruling out process that takes so long that by the time an activity is decided upon the time you had in which to engage in it has passed (like what happened to Frankie).

The truth is this: when our family members are not with us, we may have a small undercurrent of worry (What are they doing? Are they safe?), or at least of distraction that gets in the way.

In the end, she got it right. She did want her family around, just (barely) within earshot and eyeshot in the next room, working on a puzzle together, getting along with each other. They had strict instructions not to talk to her or try to engage her in any way whatsoever.

She had the best couple of hours ever.

Water torture? Not!

by Karen, posted in books, health

“If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.” ~Wayne Dyer

Last night I was trying to shut off my (monkey) mind long enough to fall asleep when I became aware of a noise that at first I couldn’t place.

What was it? Oh no…drip, drip, drip….It was water. Dripping water, like of the water torture variety.  A little more investigation gleaned some annoying information: it was from somewhere outside. You know, so that it couldn’t be shut off. OMG. I could feel my blood pressure inching up as I was freaking out about my coming sure-to-be-sleepless night of listening to the drip-drip-dripping water (icicles melting from the roof) when I suddenly had another thought. This time though, it was a useful thought.

It was Wayne Dyer’s quote (above) that popped into my head. I had heard it earlier that day in an audiobook.  There was not a thing on God’s green earth that I could do at 10 o’clock at night to stop the dripping water outside, but hey, maybe I could change how I was thinking about the dripping water?

I gave it a try:

  1. I’m grateful for the roof over my head.
  2. I’m happy to be in my own bed in my own home.
  3. Maybe the dripping is not so bad?
  4. What if I try to meditate? I could say the “So Hum” meditation (the one that I know I can do without thinking too much about it).
  5. What if every time I notice a drip, I (mentally) say the word “So”, then the next drip, I say the word “Hum”, and so on?  Which at least gave me something constructive to do and actually might coax my blood pressure back down to an acceptable level?

Well…guess what! It worked! I still heard it, but it didn’t make me anxious or mad anymore. In an odd sort of way, it felt comforting. So here’s a corollary to Wayne’s quote: If you change the way you listen to things, the things you listen to change.

🙂