Healthy Self-Love

After my husband and I were married, our first home together was an apartment in Kurt and Victoria Singer's house in "downtown" East Burke, Vermont. I put downtown in quotes, because if you happened to be driving through town and blinked, you might miss it! Kurt was an English professor at Lyndon State College, where Don also taught and managed the meteorology lab.

Kurt was the most generous landlord I ever had. Compared to what, you may ask? There is no comparison. What other landlord never raises your rent after four years' occupancy? Babysits your newborn son while you and your spouse slip out for a quick dinner at a restaurant? Leaves the local newspaper on your step every afternoon after he's read it? Almost always has something witty or encouraging to say when he sees you?

Kurt was a man of strong opinions. A lifelong educator, he believed the trend toward raising self-esteem in students as a vehicle toward higher achievement got it all wrong. I'm not against people having higher self-esteem. I get downright militant when I see anyone putting somebody down. Valuing oneself and others is, after all, one of the themes of this blog. He was overstating the point, but I think Kurt what meant was that cultivating self-esteem too frequently gets in the way of holding kids to high educational standards. You risk having kids who think they're all that, when they don't know anything.

I think a lot about self-esteem these days, sometimes indulging myself in reminiscences of when I had little to none of the stuff. I ran into a woman I've known for sixteen years last week who said, "You're looking wonderful. What have you been doing?" I was in the middle of a conversation with another lady and promised her I'd let her know my "secrets" another time. I saw her again in passing yesterday and still haven't given her an answer.

This post is a beginning. Her question got me thinking. I could simply say I've learned to love running again and am watching what I eat. Both are true. But I wouldn't be telling her the whole truth, because healthy self-regard is the bigger part of my "diet secret," to use the vernacular.

How did I get there? Conventional suggestions, like a food diary, have certainly been helpful to me. Stepping up the intensity of my exercise has also been effective. I've always been active, but I also love to cook and eat and drink wine. My weight was slowly creeping up. When I admitted to myself that there weren't enough hours in a day to exercise in proportion to the calories I was taking in, there really wasn't any other option for me. I had to eat less.

But what drove me to eat too much? Or more to the point, what was eating me? Once I began exploring that topic, I discovered reservoirs of self-knowledge, self-acceptance and ultimately increased self-confidence. And even a little courage. I started running 5K races, which led me to train for the Bolder Boulder, a race where 50,000 mostly local folks walk and run every Memorial Day. I never really stop training. I know some marathoners who encourage me to try the Everest of running, but this girl knows her limits. The 10K is a good distance for me, challenging my body and mind while not pushing too hard. After all, I'd like to still be at this for quite a few more years.

For me, however, getting in touch with my physical self is deepest when I check in with my spiritual self. I was introduced to meditation at age 21, when I started doing tai chi at the mission in Santa Cruz in Sherry Seidman's rose garden class. Standing meditation doesn't look strenuous, with your arms encircled in front of your heart--until you try staying in the pose for five minutes. Persisting with anything strenuous, whether it's running or tai chi or a difficult patch in a relationship, builds strength. Later I added yoga to my repertoire. Most people know yoga asana, the series of poses. But most people don't know that asana was developed to facilitate meditation practice. Your body has to be supple and relaxed to sit in meditation long enough to reach those higher states of consciousness all yogis and yoginis aspire to.

I can tell you from many years of experience it's worth the investment of your time. In the process of discovering who you really are, rather than what you'd like to be or what others tell you they'd like you to be, I can guarantee you will be grateful for the place you occupy in the world. Even if it's less exalted, as has been my experience, than what you had previously hoped for. That's what I mean when I refer to healthy self-love. Not the crass self-esteem we see expressed everywhere in American culture, the kind that causes sensitive souls to run screaming in the other direction, saying, "Is that all there is? Because I ain't buying it."

I'm here to tell you you don't have to buy into anything. You can, however, earn healthy self-love. Start today.

Harvest Time

It's been a good year in our garden. I say this with some hesitation, because some things have been less successful than in years past. Raspberries, eggplants and peppers have been noticeably fewer. Tomatoes, sour cherries and cucumbers, on the other hand, have been bounteous, to the point where I've considered playing doorbell-ditchums with the cukes. String beans, meanwhile, have been middling.

I suppose my Grandma and Grandpa Finnegan must have felt the same ambivalence about the varying fortunes on their ranch in Montana. My grandpa was a restless person who, because of deteriorating health, ended up spending the last thirty years of his life in one spot. Grandma said whenever they had a down year on the ranch he would talk about moving to Oregon, where you could stick anything in the ground any time of the year and it would grow. I imagine a good part of his suffering was due to seeing the grass growing greener everywhere but his own fields.

That's the problem with comparisons of any kind. Everything changes. Always has. Always will. Best to accept it. Eat what grows best this season. We've enjoyed every raspberry, eggplant and pepper we've picked. Though we don't have a peach tree in our yard, this year's crop of Western slope peaches have been everything a peach can promise. You know how some peaches look great, all plump with that perfect peach blush, only when you bite into them, they're disappointingly pasty? This year's crop tastes as good as it looks. After a few down years on the tomato front, it's been great to have more than our fair share. I've dried a lot of cherries I'll include in my oatmeal, and I've frozen enough of them to make a cherry pie in the dead of winter.

I still wish we had more eggplants this year. I love baba ganouj and mousakka. There's always next year.

Worry Holiday

In church yesterday, our minister Rev. Martie McMane gave a great sermon on keeping the Sabbath. It's almost incredible that a minister of the progressive United Church of Christ in the People's Republic of Boulder, no less, would give a speech on keeping the Sabbath, and keep a congregation of more than 200 people totally rapt. But that is the courage of Martie McMane.

She touched on worry as an activity to leave behind on the Sabbath. As a world class worrier I decided I was going to do my best to take a worry holiday, to not borrow trouble. I've been saturated in worry since I was in my mother's womb. When the women in my family love, we worry.

But worry is so negative. It's a way of not allowing myself to feel the tender, out-of-control-ness of love. Love might overwhelm me with tenderness and vulnerability, while worry is a spiral, perhaps motivated by love, but actually more by fear, and the fear of losing what I have, or what I think is mine, or wish was mine, or despair that will ever be mine. Worry is pain. Love has a pain component, and there's also that vulnerability piece I avoid like the plague. Not gonna allow myself to be vulnerable and exposed.

Worry constructs a wall against attacks, real and perceived. Whereas with love, there are no walls. Only unity with all that life can bring, joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain, courage and fear. In love there are no barriers. That's what Joni Mitchell is saying in "Clouds": "I really don't know love at all." I admit I really don't know love.

I could judge myself for that--I've had almost 50 years to learn, blah, blah, blah. But I'm going to start my loving close to home--I'm going to refrain from self-judgment.

Because my capacity to love is not a competition--it's an evolution. I make no judgment on how fast or how slowly I've evolved in my capacity to love. Let's say I'm growing in my capacity to love. I'm not going to pretend I'm better or worse at it than anyone else, or than I have been at other times in my life. I am where I am. Or to quote the great Popeye, "I yam what I yam."

Respect yourself

All of us have challenges in our relationships. It's easy to point fingers of blame at those who oppose us, offend us and annoy us. It's difficult to look at ourselves as troublemakers in our own lives.

In some instances, a little offense is the best defense. But as a way of life, not so much. If I'm often taking offense at what people say or do, it's time to look at my reactivity and control issues. Who am I to think I can get everything I want, when there's a whole world of people who want things, too? I get through my days better and sleep through the night when I let the small-minded stuff go. I'm clearer about what I really need.

It all comes down to respect. Respect for others is important, but I argue self-respect comes first. You can't truly respect anyone until you respect yourself. When we don't properly respect ourselves, we drive ourselves hard, or we let ourselves off too easily. We don't allow ourselves to rest, or we get lazy. We judge ourselves, or when that's too painful, we tell ourselves we have the right to blame somebody else for our problems.

One of my favorite songs on my MP3 is the Staples Singers' "Respect Yourself." The Staples aren't letting anybody get away with blaming anybody else. Respect yourself by taking responsibility, not by expecting somebody else to do it for you. When my energy is flagging during a run and that song comes on, my legs lighten, my breathing eases and I hold my head up high. With my new attitude, I know I can make it.

I pride myself on my physical flexibility, which allows me to easily do almost any physical activity. For instance, I used to be able to get out of bed in the morning and touch my toes. In the past year, I haven't been able to do it. Like cold silly putty, it takes a little while for my muscles to warm up before I can lengthen them. Intellectually, this isn't such a bad thing. I am pushing 50, after all. If this is the worst thing I can say about my physical condition, I'll take it.

But I've noticed something more insidious: I'm judging myself, and therefore disrespecting myself, for not being able to touch my toes first thing in the morning. Something within, some combination of ego and early conditioning, tells me, Why, you used to be able to do that. You ought to still be able to. When I began to notice I was judging myself, I started to think about how self-judgment was infiltrating other areas of my life. I haven't been successful in my job search, not to mention that I haven't been that successful in my career as I'd like. I'm not a good mother, wife, daughter, sister, friend. You see the potential for a downward spiral. For disrespecting myself.

I also found, to my amusement, that I was judging myself for judging myself! So then I gave myself some kudos for honesty and a sense of humor about my foibles--a value and a talent I've been working on for most of my adult life.

See how easy it is to respect yourself? Just begin where you are. Don't worry too much about where you've been. As your relationship with yourself improves, you relationship with others will improve, too.

Learning from Pagans

I'd never heard of Phillip Emmons Isaac Bonewits until I heard his obituary on NPR last week. He was the founder of Ar nDraiocht Fein, a Druid Fellowship.

I was raised in a Christian home, and I'm still an active member of a Christian denomination, but I've been accused of having pagan tendencies. Hiking, and running--heck, just about any strenuous physical activity--transport me not to a state of praising Jesus (though I'm not averse to it) but to one of reverent awe.

It turns out we all have something to learn from Isaac Bonewits. He developed a framework to gauge whether religious groups like his own were edging toward cultism. He called it the "Advanced Bonewits Cult Danger Evaluation Frame." Simple as ABCDEF. It measures a religious organization's level of internal and external control, wisdom/knowledge claimed and credited to, and dogma, among other things. My favorite is of Grimness, or in Bonewits' words, "The amount of disapproval concerning jokes about the group, its doctrines or its leader." People who take themselves too seriously are funny, yet frightening.

Take The Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, Florida and its plans for the 9/11 anniversary.

Will the center:

a. plan a day of prayer in remembrance of those who died in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania

b. host an interfaith dialog between Muslim, Christian and other religious leaders

c. burn as many Korans as it can

Ding, ding, ding, if you guessed 'c'! Hard to believe a church that calls itself Christian would host a Koran roast, but there it is. Now which religion is it that we're supposed to be tolerant of?

Terry Jones, the church's pastor and his so-called "congregation" are registering high marks on Bonewits' Grimness measure. Ain't nothing funny about hate.

If Dove World Outreach Center and Ar nDraiocht Fein were the only places of worship left on the planet, one guess which one I'd attend.

Humor Deficit

There's lots of talk about budget deficits. But the humor deficit, arguably easier to address, is raging out of control. There are way too many people taking themselves way too seriously. People seriously need to lighten up.

You see it in Charlie Rangel's pissy response to Luke Russert's question, "What are you going to do if you lose your job?" You see tea partiers being unintentionally funny when they hoist photos of President Obama sporting a Hitler 'stache.

I've been known to laugh at comedy that excoriates people, especially when it's aimed at politicians and celebrities who have started to believe in their own hype. But there's a special place in my heart for comics who use themselves as the subject and object of their humor. Dave Chappelle is a genius at this. Chris Rock of "Everybody Hates Chris" fame also uses self-deprecation to great effect.

I'd like to add another to the list, Greg Keeler, one of my English professors at Montana State. He ought to be better known than he is, because he is one of the funniest people on the planet. He teaches poetry, and he's also turned his talented hand to writing songs in the cowboy poet tradition. The first time I met Greg was at a retreat at the Lake Yellowstone Hotel the week before my first semester at MSU. I was slightly older than most of the other students, and the professors had already heard Greg perform many times before. But his songs, delivered in Greg's deadpan, Kristoffersonian voice (I think that's a good thing, by the way), completely cracked me up. From "Bunny Hell" to "Trout Fishing Beatitudes," I was the only person to laugh out loud.

After that, I made sure to take a poetry class I could with Greg, hoping some of his magic would rub off on me. To no avail, because my poetry still sucked. Still does suck. But I always had fun in his class, and he was unfailingly encouraging.

The first time my husband Don ever met Greg was at an English department picnic. Don was instantly charmed when Greg invited him to shoot targets with a BB gun he'd brought along. The target? "Poetry Man" comic books another student had made, with Greg's cartooned image on the cover. Luckily he had brought a big stack of them along. People were shootin' 'em up!

Who knows? Maybe laughter is some kind of wealth engine we can use to attack our budget deficits.

Got Optimism?

Where does someone in need of an infusion of exuberance and optimism look? Why, Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, of course. OK, only if you're a total dork, or have an English degree. Guilty on both counts. I looked through my bookshelf, thinking I still had a copy. Earlier this week I received a facsimile of the original 1855 edition.

What I'm looking for is right there on the cover, beneath the title: "Bold-faced thoughts on the power and pleasure of self-expression." Zowie. There's the beginning of that mojo I need to reclaim.

Whitman wrote LOG less than a hundred years after the founding of this country, and he's downright giddy about the possibilities. I don't remember reading his prose introduction, which reads more like a list of America's virtues than an essay.

"The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nature. The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem. . . . Of all nations the United States with veins full of poetical stuff most need poets and will doubtless have the greatest and use them the greatest. Their Presidents shall not be their common referee so much as their poets shall."

I'm only at the beginning of the book, but already I can't help but contrast Whitman's faith in the inherent greatness of our country and its people with the gloomy and mean rhetoric we hear from many in public life now. I don't hear enough of the "power and pleasure of self-expression," unless it's from people who are more interested in hearing themselves talk than in making our nation greater. Maybe there's so little of it because many have decided we can't afford it. There's altogether too many bald-faced accusations and mischaracterizations and not enough trust in our ability to solve the problems of our day.

It's not like I'm going to stop reading the news. But I expect that marinating myself in Whitman's prose poems is just the tonic I need.