Cirque du Malaise

I threw out my shoulder-ish area doing yoga a bunch of days ago. Yup, that’s right, doing yoga. So for those of you that say you can’t get injured doing yoga, um, you can. (And on that note, have you read Vanessa’s interview with William J Broad on Recovering Yogi? He’s the New York Times writer who wrote The Science of Yoga and subsequently got slammed throughout the entire righteous, holier than thou yoga community for daring to suggest that you can actually get hurt doing the physical postures.)

The thing about this particular injury that was so awesome is that it actually happened while I was lying around watching Parks & Rec on Hulu. One minute I was trying to drink my tea without actually sitting up, and dribbling it all over my hoody*; the next I was hunched over in pain. But, with the help of my astute squadron of bodyworkers, I am feeling slightly less old and feeble. I traced the whole thing back to some particularly nefarious chaturangas I had done two days earlier. If you ever want to really whack out your thoracic, try this one-two approach:

1. Spend 4 days on the East Coast subsisting on Dunkin Donuts while constantly sitting in a car or airplane.
2. Then jump back into your yoga routine by doing a really hard yoga class next to your ex-boyfriend, who you ran into at yoga, and who, the last time he saw you, saw a much skinnier, younger version of you.

No bueno. I am not awesome at being sick or injured. I slide very quickly into a self-pitying miasma of woe and hopelessness. So, sorry for all of you who had to deal with it. And thanks to those of you that offered a healing hand. A special thanks to Andrew.

Andrew is a San Francisco acupuncturist who I’ve been seeing for about ten years, maybe even a little bit more. He specializes in sports injuries and pain and he is really flipping good at what he does. What he did for me last night was give me some needles in just the right spots, and then hook up some of them to the e-stim machine. Don’t make the same mistake I did and google this; I’ll just tell you. “E-stim” is short for electro-stimulation, and is basically electroshock therapy, although Andrew wouldn’t hook it up to my brain, even though I practically begged. Once the muscles chilled out from the needles and the vibration of the e-stim, he gave me a tough love massage. The muscles that were jacked were my subscapulari (plural I just made up for both of the subscapularis muscles, which live in that no-touch zone under the shoulder blades — the scapula — and are basically impossible to reach). He got into my under-the-shoulder-blade area by way of my armpit. This is how he prepped me for this episode:

“You are really not going to like this.”

Not what you want to hear while you are getting a massage.

I was crying and whining the entire time. It was intensely, awesomely painful. And it totally helped. My shoulder and neck feel way better today. I could go into some whole poetic metaphor about how sometimes you have to go through the fire to get to the clear, or how it hurt so good, or something else equally literarily redonquilous, but I’ll just leave it at this: Andrew is a genius, and you should all go to him for your injuries, yoga or other.

Oh, and he’s also awesome to talk to and doesn’t at all mind if you whine a lot! Right, Andrew? Right?

This is actually a picture that a professional photographer took of Andrew giving me acupuncture once. Long story why I even have this, but the photographer is Quinn Wharton and he's very talented too.

* Yes, I am single. Why do you ask?

I have never been a morning person and getting up early has always been a struggle for me. In fact, getting up, period, has always been a struggle for me. I like to clock about 9 hours of sleep a night and if I don’t, I generally feel like murder all day. Except between 9pm and midnight, when I always feel completely alert and pretty much fantastic, no matter what.

It’s not uncommon for me to stay up until 1 or 2 in the morning reading or writing or watching mindless sitcoms, but luckily for me I work for myself and don’t have to set an alarm. Not setting an alarm is a way of life I am quite devoted to, in fact. You might say it’s a personal philosophy. I think the world would be a better place and we would all be better people if we were abiding by our own natural sleep rhythms. For me, that means I don’t generally wake up before 9 in the morning, and sometimes later, depending on the time of year and how enthralling the book is that I am currently reading until the wee hours. (Which, right now, is the new Steve Jobs bio and yeah, it’s a good one.)

Occasionally I will make the mistake of having a soda at the movies — like I did when I saw the incredible Steampunk (thanks, Maynard) masterpiece Hugo the other night — and then I’ll have an even harder time getting up because of the sugar hangover.

This is not just laziness or petulance on my part. It’s my genetic legacy. The other day I called my dad at 9:30pm East Coast time and asked him what he was up to. He sounded groggy and out of it. I thought I might have woken him up. And I had. “I’m napping,” he said grumpily. That’s right, napping. When pressed, he elaborated that he generally naps in the late evening and then gets up and starts painting. “Jos,” he said, “You know I get my best painting done between midnight and 3am."

My dad is retired and recently managed to finally shake his horrible evil coldhearted wife of the last 25 years, so he can afford not to set an alarm or bother to care what society at large thinks about what time it is appropriate to get up in the morning. In this way, he is my hero.

Roughly 15-17 times a week, someone tries to convince me that I should really get up earlier so that I can better accommodate their schedule. My exception-less refusal is just one of the many reasons I'm starting to suspect that I will always be alone. But as long as I can sleep in, I'm fine with that. Oh, and before you start to suspect that I'm a nihilist, here's my Christmas tree:

Every once in a while — okay let’s just call it once a month — I resign myself to take a mental health day. A mental health day is when, despite the mountains of work and exercise obligations and “should’s” and “must’s” and “have to’s,” one instead collapses on the couch in a state of general malaise, maybe sobs a little bit, and then watches 8 straight hours of mindless television while eating cookies and soup for dinner (in that order).

Mental health days are absolutely essential for maintaining spiritual equilibrium, especially around the holiday season. And to be really worthwhile, they have to happen when it’s least convenient and there is the most amount of pressing things to get done STAT.

I had a mental health day yesterday. Mondays are good days for mental health days because they are a) high pressure days to begin with and b) a great way to set you up for a week of saying “fuck it.” On this particular Monday, I had just gotten back from spending the weekend with good friends up in Mendocino. I had already taken a half day to drive home, and was planning to buckle down the moment I arrived at my office in order to power through several hours of work before going to yoga at 6:30pm like a good Godfearin’ yogi.

But it was not to be.

It was too cold in my house to think (cursed damp 55 degree November day) and things were out of sorts. Because I was gone all weekend and have been busy lately, there was an ominous pile of laundry calling me. There were tumbleweeds on the floor and a sink full of dishes and, try as I might, I could not ignore them. But I couldn’t get myself to do them, either, because that would just be admitting defeat over my concentration issues. So instead, I did the logical thing: I flung myself on the couch, had a tantrum for just a sec, and then commenced to watched back-to-back episodes of Six Feet Under until midnight.

I didn’t go to yoga. You know how they say, “You never regret going to yoga”? You know how they say that? You know how they tell you that going to yoga will fix whatever ails you? That if you have a cold coming on, you should “sweat it out”? If you just got really bad news, you can “find gratitude” on your mat? If you are experiencing general malaise, you should “get out of your head”?

Sometimes they are right. I’ve had these yoga-saving experiences; I have. But I’ll tell you what. Nothing brings you back to a state of equanimity and peace like a good old fashioned mental health sesh on the couch.

The slow decline into winter’s dark days is a time when my bio-clock says “Slow down! Hibernate! Store up fat for winter!” and accordingly, my energy level plummets and I desire warm, high-calorie foods and less activity. This is the season when I am most inclined to blow things of a social or active nature off and geek out on the Internet instead.

I used to fight it. I used to self-judge. But I’ll tell you, I’ve really learned to abide by my need for a periodic mental health day. I’ve been taking them my entire life. They really do work. Better than yoga.

It was rainy and glum yesterday, and that made me happy.

I was looking forward to a cozy night at home with the kitties, recuperating from my trip back east and getting rotisserie chicken at the farmer's market, and then curling up in my sleeping bag and watching my last bootlegged episode of Game of Thrones on my big new Apple monitor. I was looking forward to it so much, in fact, that of course the universe decided to thwart the whole idea. Actually, PG&E decided to thwart it.

Some project they had embarked on in my front yard went awry and our gas got disconnected. I discovered this when I went to make tea for the 400th time and the stove wouldn't light. I had a long, circuitous discussion with the PG&E repair dudes out front, and only by deductive reasoning was I able to ascertain that yes, in fact, they had accidently turned the gas off.

But don't worry, they said; it will be back on in 5 hours or so. Grr. Without gas, I have no stove (which means no tea), no heat, and no hot water.

First world problem, I told myself.

Then I went out to dinner with Maynard and ordered enough food to feed a small Malaysian village.

When I got back, the PG&E truck was once again parked out front and they were fixing the gas. The tall, beady-eyed repairman, who I am pretty sure has a mild case of Asperger's (sidenote — I sometimes think I myself have a mild case of Asperger's, so I'm not judging, just saying) came into my cottage to relight the pilots on my stove, hot water heater, and — most importantly — my regular heater.

My heater is the thing that makes my apartment so wonderfully warm and toasty and cozy and charming and just all around sweet. It’s a faux fireplace that lights up with the flick of a switch and renders the entire cottage Bikram-yoga-warm in a matter of minutes, while throwing off an inviting, wholesome amber glow. It’s so efficient that I never leave it on for more than a few minutes and I often keep the windows cracked when it’s on. I do, however, use it year round, because the Bay Area in June can be a cold bitter winter. The heater was the main source of my panic attack around not having gas. I can live without showering and hot tea, but I can’t live in a chilly cottage when it's raining for days on end.

Sadly, this is the point at which the dude informed me that my heater is totally against code and will probably poison me with carbon monoxide any minute now IF it doesn’t explode in a giant violent fireball. He said this with zero bedside manner, before giving me a lecture about how air works and quizzing me about whether I actually learned anything in high school science class (rhetorical question; I didn’t). He dramatically refused to light the pilot and backed away, muttering about the inane person who had sold us and then installed a lethal weapon in place of a heater.

Naturally, I googled “death by Carbon Monoxide poisoning.”

Now if they’re trying to make it sound scary, they are doing a really bad job. That’s A. I mean, on the list of ways to die, silently and painlessly in one’s sleep is preferable.

What’s B? B is that I got the pilot lit anyway and turned the heater back on. It’s been working for a year and a half and I haven’t asphyxiated yet. But I did plug in the carbon monoxide alarm that's been languishing in my drawer since the last time it went off (when I told myself, “the thing must be on the fritz”).

Unfortunately, it did go off again in the middle of the night. And more unfortunately, I was so tired that I got up out of bed, unplugged it, and put it back in the drawer. The one thing I am more afraid of than death is not getting enough sleep.

As usual this morning I slept until 930, spent a half hour staring off into space while sipping tea, and then started to think about actually maybe working around mid-morning, with a slow and gentle easing-in to actually checking my email, for starters. This is my daily ritual and the whole process typically takes at least a few hours. This is why I don't ever calendar in anything productive before noon. (Note to my two friends who are constantly and relentlessly trying to get me to go on morning hikes with them; you know who you are.)

This particular morning, just as I was about to dive in to maybe kind of doing something soon, I got a Skype-chat message from my friend Don. (FYI there is no end to the myriad and creative ways you can get in touch with me in writing. The phone? Not so much.)

The Bunny Photo © andyfreeberg.com

Don had a cold (possibly the same TB-like bug I suffered from last week) and wanted to know if I would take his symphony tickets for tonight off his hands. Oh yes! I am not one to not jump on free symphony tickets. I love classical music and love an excuse to wear The Bunny even more. The Bunny is a white rabbit-fur vest I was given by someone, at some point, that is incredibly NOT P.C. but super soft and yummy and kind of awesome. In a terrible way. Note: I do not condone wearing fur. But I do wear The Bunny on occasion. Just one of the many ways I contain multitudes, y’all.

The one catch? I had to drive up and over the hill to Muir Beach to pick up the symphony tickets at Don’s house.

A normal person could probably zip out and take care of this tiny little errand and be back at work shortly and then pat themselves on the back for having such an awesome laidback freelancing lifestyle that they can do spontaneous things in the middle of the day. Not me.

Muir beach is about a 10-minute scenic drive up Highway One that proceeded to take me about 2 1/2 hours. I went by way of The Whole so that I could grab some soup for Don, and I happened to run into my good friend Michelle who I hadn’t seen in ages. We sat on a bench and filled each other in for a while. It was great to see her.

When I left The Whole I started to drive up the mountain, but soon enough I nearly hit two dogs running around maniacally in the road. I pulled over, got honked at a bunch (California drivers are unerringly righteous), and finally succeeded in steering these two clueless, spastic, and super smelly terriers back to their rightful owners, who were all, “What? We didn’t even notice they got out!” (Sidenote, not a dog person, and always think it’s weird when people “don't notice” that their huge, pungent, loud, obnoxious dogs are not in the yard. It makes me vaguely suspicious that they are secretly “forgetting” to secure the gate so the dogs will “accidentally” run away.)

After that, I followed a tourist up and over the hill at an excruciatingly slow crawl until I finally got to Don’s. Tickets in hand, I decided to take the more direct route back to my house, forgetting that there is construction going on in a feeble and ongoing attempt prevent the entire highway from sliding down into Green Gulch Zen Center. I stared at this for about 20 minutes:

I got back to my house around 12:30. Still plenty of time to salvage my workday.

I didn’t need to leave for the symphony until 5:30. Five hours.

Problem is, I had to start my whole “settling in” routine all over again. As the minutes ticked by and I found myself once again starting into space, dicking around on email, making myself another pot of tea, making myself lunch, letting my neurotic cat Luka in and out every 3.5 seconds, and responding like Pavlov’s dog to every single text message (and oh yes, writing this blog post), I began to get increasingly panicky about getting anything done today.

1:30. Blood pressure starting to really rise. Still not working.

2:30. Getting highly panicky. Have at least 4 hours of mandatory client work to finish today. Start obsessing over reorganizing my calendar to fit it into my weekend instead.

3:00. So completely panicky at this point that I’m nibbling on a xanax to calm down.

3:30. Tired. Really tired. Maybe a little too much nibbling.

4:00. Angry nap.

5:00. I have to leave in a half hour.

5:30. Let’s just write that one off as a “personal day”?

This, kids, is why I work evenings and weekends.

I’m going to say this right up front: I read Us Weekly sometimes.

I try to let people know this shortly after we meet, so they don’t get some sort of inaccurate idea about what sort of person I am. I have a policy about setting the bar low for myself, so that there is an opportunity for people to be pleasantly surprised down the line when they find out that I really am relatively smart, I don’t own a TV, and I vote.

But just because I like to read, and I can string two sentences together, does not mean that I spend my spare time catching up on back copies of The New Yorker. I think The New Yorker is just about the most boring publication in the known universe (except that recent article about Scientology that was o-mazing). Maybe you have to be from New York, I don’t know, I don’t get it.

Unlike a certain ex-bf of mine who liked to pile issues of The Economist by the bed without ever actually cracking them (not sure if he could read, to be honest, but he did like to watch conspiracy videos ad nauseam — a story for another time), I think that reading magazines is mainly something one does to relax. I can’t think of a better way to veg out than to spend an hour flipping through what is basically a picture book of inane celebrity footage.

Of course I don’t actually believe anything I read in Us Weekly! Of course I don’t!

My favorite section in Us Weekly is “Stars, They’re Just Like Us”. This is where they feature pictures of celebrities merely going about their business on a daily, while getting sabotaged by paparazzi at the most pedestrian and embarrassing moments. “Kate Hudson… pumps her own gas”.   It’s so silly it’s fascinating.

So there it is. I read Us Weekly, it’s true… and I love it. And I am not ashamed. Well, maybe just a little bit ashamed.

But you know what I've noticed about Us Weekly? My friends who condescend to me for reading it are always the first ones to  abscond with it and curl up with it when they are at my house. I'm just the one brave enough to buy it.

I'm a big fan of setting myself up for success with highly achievable goals (as per my New Year's Resolution post I wrote a while back). For this reason, I have always done very poorly in sales-oriented jobs. It is also one of the reasons I can't stand the hyper-vapid concept of manifestation around abundance.

For a very long time, I've been feeling defeated around my time management skills (or complete lack thereof). Try as I might to hold myself strictly to 9-6 work hours, I never seem to get enough done and find myself working far into the evening most of the time. In fact, the only time I really ever get anything done is after 4p.m.

This is the actual alarm clock I own. It's really more of an art piece now.

Mornings are virtually useless around here. I often spend vast spans of my a.m. time gazing listlessly off into the middle distance and drooling as my mind remains a peaceful oasis of inactivity. When people suggest that a meditation practice is best attended to in the morning—while your mind is still calm—I wonder, but how am I supposed to actually sit up for that long before noon?

My biorhythms have always been this way. If you put me in a big windowless room without stimuli and conduct experiments as to my brainwaves and such, I guarantee you will find that my brain is most (and only, really) active in the p.m. hours. When I started my own business a few years ago, I made myself a promise that I would no longer subject myself to the vicious, unnatural mercy of an alarm clock. It's a pretty common occurrence for me to sleep until 9:30 or 10:00. When I force myself to get up earlier, I feel vaguely nauseated and markedly more irritable all day long.

Still, it wasn't until last week that I decided once and for all to let myself off the hook for being a more productive citizen in the mornings. I was talking to any old friend who I often turn to for business advice. I explained my issue with mornings and time management. He said, why don't you just start your day at noon then?

The truth is, for all practical purposes, that's what I already do. But I TRY otherwise. I try to get started right away in the morning. I try, and I fail, and I feel bad about it. Over and over and over. But when my friend/business advisor gave me permission to start my day at noon, I thought, of course! It only makes sense.

For crying out loud, I work for myself. I mean, I couldn't possibly have a cooler boss.

So this last week, I experimented with going for walks in the morning, having coffee dates, and sometimes just sitting around waking up slowly. I have to say that my new goal of starting my day by noon has been flawlessly successful so far.

(In case you're wondering, I auto-set this post to publish at 8a.m. I am definitely still sleeping.)

My new animal totem, the almighty sloth

Way back in February, after my first night of my dharma course at Spirit Rock, I wrote a post about the five hindrances to meditation and how Sloth & Torpor are my particular nemeses. That, sadly, has not changed. Sloth & Torpor (and just plain ugly laziness) continue to hijack my sitting practice on a constant basis.

I can be running around like a crazy anxious freak all day, and the moment I sit in the meditation position, I basically fall over. I know what you're thinking—that I run myself too ragged and of course I fall asleep when I calm down. But no, that's not it. Even on the most absurdly indulgent amount of sleep, an adequate but not gratuitous amount of caffeine, and with all the stars and my monthly hormones aligned, it still happens. It happens regardless of time of day, day of week, circumstance, or situation. I try to meditate; I fall asleep.

It's gotten to the point where the mere suggestion of meditation makes me sleepy. This last week as I was making the long, serene drive up to Woodacre for my evening class, I was heavy lidded at the wheel. I'm pretty sure I was actually asleep for some parts of that drive.

Of course, the moment I leave class and get back in my car, I am wide the freak awake.

I have asked a few of my meditation teachers what they make of it. This is what Frank Berliner had to say: "You're probably hiding from something."

Awesome, now my own mind is hiding something from me? That's just terrific. I feel like I'm going to end up on Oprah one of these days, telling the whole world that I suddenly remembered some horrible event from my childhood that my subconscious has been suppressing all these years, and suing my parents to within an inch of their life.

Mark Coleman calls this aversion "the pleasant coma." And that's the problem. It actually is quite pleasant. It's the same thing that happens to me when I get acupuncture or a massage. Utter and instant slumber. I have been known to sleep through more than one power yoga class.

The problem is, I feel gypped that I don't get to experience the other hindrances. Just once, I want to spend my meditation session in a state of aversion, or craving, or doubt. Sloth & Torpor is kidnapping my mind.

Or maybe I just have a mild and lingering case of mono?

This week I heard a brilliant expression that I have decided to co-opt:

Ferocious Self Care

I am pretty big on self-care in general and have noticed (as I'm doing The Artist's Way) that I kind of spoil myself rotten most of the time.

For instance, even though I know that wheat is the most evil substance known to man, I'm a big fan of eating cookies in the middle of the afternoon to palliate the soul, and that sort of thing. I also get consistent acupuncture, take Chinese herbs, start my day with warm lemon water, obsess about reflective journaling, practice yoga (kind of, shut up), have a fledgling daily meditation practice, and get bodywork on a regular.

So, taking care of myself is not something I think I'm particularly bad at. But taking FEROCIOUS care of myself is a whole nother matter.

Soon after I first heard this expression, I came down with a nasty head cold that totally floored me. And that's when I discovered what Ferocious Self Care really means.

It means that you cancel everything (no matter how allegedly important it may seem and how guilty you may feel for doing so and how much you truly believe that everyone in your life is counting on you and will fall apart if you don't show up... cuz guess what, you're wrong), and you go home and make beef barley soup, from scratch, and lie around in your sweats under a down comforter watching bad TV and not thinking about anything productive.

For heaven's sake, why is it so hard to take pictures of soup?

It also means you sometimes have to practice tough love with yourself so you don't get sick in the first place. That means making healthy choices, not compulsive choices.

I don't have what you'd call a tough constitution. If I had been born in the olden days I for sure would have been one of those people who died of the common cold. One day a sneeze, and the next thing... death. A tragic "she caught a chill" kind of thing.

And I am an extremely whiny sick person. I get into major self-pity downward spiral mode, fast. I'm not into the whole "power through it" thing. I roll my eyes when people say they're going to go to a hot yoga class and "sweat it out." When in doubt, I believe in sleeping it out.

Luckily, thanks to my talented acupuncturist (thank you Rebecca), my gourmet advisor at the hole (thank you Maynard), and my favorite guilty pleasure, Theraflu (thank you, pharmaceutical industry), I'm on the road to recovery.

Tonight was my first in a ten-week series of classes on Buddhism. It was kind of exhausting.

To be fair, the exhausting part was not the Buddhist part. The exhausting part was scrambling like mad to get there from my house in Mill Valley during rush hour traffic while simultaneously trying to coordinate to meet up with my "Dharma partner" (and perpetually harried BFF) Bria.

When I finally arrived and launched into our first meditation sit, I realized how anxiety-tired I was. (My acupuncturist would call this a qi deficiency and hook me up to the E-stem, stat. For those who haven't had the pleasure of being hooked up to an E-stem, it's a nifty little gadget that gives you tiny little electrical jolts along your meridians, not unlike electroshock therapy, which Younger Me was always very curious about thanks to my early obsession with Sylvia Plath.)

In Buddhism, there are Five Hindrances to Meditation.

Different schools of Buddhist thought call them by different names, but they are all essentially the same. I like these descriptions, personally, for their dramatic flair:

1. Sensory Desire

2. Ill Will

3. Sloth and Torpor

4. Restlessness and Remorse

5. Doubt

I'm usually a big fan of Doubt in my very loosely defined meditation practice. However, tonight was all about the Sloth and Torpor. The moment I sat still and closed my eyes, it was all I could do not to slump over and pass out. The dirty, heavily-trafficked carpet of a budget meditation center has never looked so inviting and cozy. It was like severe and utter torture to keep myself in an upright position for the twenty minutes that lasted a hundred years.

But, I did it. I stayed upright. And now I'm a Buddhist. So I have that going for me.

Incidentally, how cute is it that they lump together Restlessness and Remorse? Like, if you're bored and antsy, chances are you're also full of regret?