Guest post by Ram Dass

In the 21 century, meditation is making a resurgence as a practical tool for coping with life and nurturing personal growth. In fact, it has become very common to use meditation techniques for stress and anxiety relief-ever for banishing panic attacks.

The benefits of meditation for anxiety and stress include reducing physical discomfort, putting things into perspective to make better decision and coping with difficult situations.

Every individual has different reasons for meditating, from relieving job stress and reducing anxiety of all kind and minimizing physical pain to improving relationships and determining life’s direction. No matter what the stress or anxiety, meditation can provide immediate relief. Later, meditation can be used to get to the heart of anxious feelings and make deeper changes.

How to Meditate to Relieve Anxiety

• If you already know the nature of you anxiety and stress, simply find it (or something similar) in this list of meditation tips for anxiety and focus your meditation practice in the recommended areas.
• If you are new to meditation, begin by reading this article by Ram Dass to learn about different meditation techniques, such as insight meditation with breathing, meditating on gurus and mantras. You’ll find techniques and ideas throughout the Ram Dass website and elsewhere that can help you improve the effectiveness of your meditation for anxiety or any other reason, including using mala beads or meditation beads, meditating on a flame and other ways to focus as you practice. It’s easy to gain meditation skills you can use right away!
• On the other hand, don’t worry if your experience doesn’t live up to your expectations of meditation. There are likely to be many good things going on that you can’t see immediately. Later, you can search for guided meditations and other advanced techniques that deepen your relief from anxiety as well as deeper knowing of yourself as you continue to practice.

01 Meditation To Calm Chaos

I’ve been living closer to the truth for a few months now. Over time, my daily meditations helped me regard what was happening in any moment with curiosity and kindness, without the mindless chatter and instant evaluation that used to whip me into a frenzy.

http://www.prevention.com/mind-body/emotional-health/meditation-find-calm-chaos

The meditation/anxiety connection:

Chaos demands our attention. It’s like a bratty child, jealous of our peace. Chaos will do everything in its power to suck you in and keep your stress level high. With meditation, you can use the quietness of your mind to surround and subdue chaos. Let it go easily somewhere else, while you apply your energy to reaching out into the universe for answers. Let the answers come to you as easily as you let chaos go.

Meditation advice for calming chaos:

1. Chaos often causes physical stress, a common side effect of anxiety. As you meditate, breathe in to invite space into your entire body, then breathe out to release tension.
2. Meditation techniques can be used to adopt an attitude of acceptance. No matter what happens, you can give yourself permission to be peaceful.
3. Use meditation to visualize yourself floating above the conflict, where you have a match wider perspective.

02 MEDITATE TO MANAGE ANGER

By naming and recognizing the many faces of anger, we can stay present with it as it arises, keeping the heart open, breathing, watching emotions come up and pass through. Meditation is the best way to do this, as it creates the space to step back from the passion, breathe, and objectively see what is at the root of the feeling.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ed-and-deb-shapiro/meditation-and-anger_b_3170506.html

The meditation/anxiety connection:

Anger is a difficult form of anxiety. We often become consumed with the accompanying stress and anguish because meditation stems from quietness, it allows you to take yourself away from anger’s usual stressful breeding ground, where you can examine the emotion honestly and safely apart from your day-to-day world. When you meditate for anxiety relief, your awareness is stronger than your anger.

Meditation advice for managing anger:

1. During meditation, first try not to think too logically about the reasons you feel angry. You can figure that out later. For now, just breathe and observe your anger.
2. Meditation relieves the anxiety of anger and puts it in perspective, but meditation won’t take away the causes of anger. Once meditation ends, you may need to take action to resolve the issues.
3. Think of meditation as a safe place to be angry, where you can step away from the emotion and observe it to see what you can learn.

03 MEDITATE TO LET GO OF DRAMA

Don’t treat yourself so gingerly; you can let go of stuff. Sometimes it takes three breaths instead of two to do it, but you can do it. Be a little tougher and don’t cling to stuff. People go around carrying everybody’s stuff all of the time. I just pick it up and put it down. Pick it up and put it down.

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Ram Dass

The meditation/anxiety connection:

We have a bad habit of gathering up dramatic feelings and situations, clutching them to us as if they were prized possessions. We feel we are entitled to our ownership of this anxiety, and we believe we must hold onto it in order to keep ourselves emotionally safe. It takes a little courage, but meditation can help us see and nurture our internal strength, so we can separate ourselves from drama and achieve anxiety relief.

Meditation advice for letting go of drama:

1. Visualization during meditation is a useful tool to define drama, understand it and let it go. Choose a tangible object to represent your anxiety. Imagine picking it up, then putting it down.
2. Before you can let drama go, you may need to first understand why you so desperately want to cling onto it. If you can’t understand it, let it go anyway.
3. Drama tends to be a bad habit. To break habits, You need to address the habitual patterns that created the habit in the first place.

04 MEDITATE TO SEE YOUR PATH

In order to see the path, you have to be very quiet and stop thinking.

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Ram Dass

The meditation/anxiety connection:

In case you haven’t figured it out by now, using meditation for anxiety and stress often hinges on finding quietness. If your anxiety is caused by not knowing which direction you should go, quietness can help you accept the answers, rather than forcing them to come. This also requires that you allow yourself to accept the path that appears to you naturally, rather than forcing your way onto a path out of fear and panic.

Meditation advice for seeing your path:

1. As you meditate, visualize a path through a forest, down a mountain, along the beach, into a city – wherever you are comfortable – and allow your mind to lead you to the answers.
2. Quietness is hard to achieve for many people. Don’t give up – you will do better with practice.
3. Simply practice letting go of thoughts as they come to you, then returning to the focus of your meditation, whether it’s your breath, a flame, or a mantra.

05 MEDITATE TO IMPROVE HEALTH

Through Mindfulness-Based Stress Relief (MBSR), patients learn how to mobilize their inner resources for coping and healing – especially for dealing with symptoms of chronic illness, and symptoms that no longer respond to standard medical treatment. Mindfulness practice helps people promote their own health by reducing the effects of stress in mind and body.

http://meditationforhealth.com

The meditation/anxiety connection:

We’re learning more every day about the connection between the mind and body. Meditation harnesses the power of the mind to make healthy changes in the body. One of the first benefits of meditation is relaxation and comfort. This can be measured by traditional medical means, including blood pressure, heart rate, and a decrease in anxiety-related symptoms, such as headaches and muscle tension.

Meditation advice for improving health:

1. Focus on specific physical ailments to realize the greatest effect of meditation for health.
2. Visualize the parts of your body involved in your physical stress; imagine muscles relaxing, joints loosening and organs working better.
3. Breathe healing energy into those areas of pain and discomfort.

06 MEDITATE TO FEEL THE NATURAL PACING OF LIFE

Let it be something that naturally falls away, rather than something you rip away.</div

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Ram Dass

The meditation/anxiety connection:

Anxiety can be caused by forcing life to happen against the natural flow. The harder we push, the more difficult life seems and the higher our anxiety and panic rise. It’s better to let go and let things happen naturally. Meditation brings anxiety relief by simply focusing on goals and allowing them to unfold.

Meditation advice for feeling the natural pacing of life:

1 Stop focusing on your effort to achieve something and instead simply create a vision of what you desire, then focus on that as you meditate.
2 When you think of your goal, imagine watching it and waiting to see what happens, instead of thinking about what you must do to force it to happen.
3 Give yourself permission to let problems and anxious feelings fall away naturally; look at them with indifference and spend your time mentally reinforcing the positive instead.

07 MEDITATE TO SEEK SIMPLICITY

There is as much joy in doing with less as there is in doing with more; it’s bizarre, and much cheaper! It also means you have to spend less time being worried about your economic situation, because you are spending less.

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Ram Dass

The meditation/anxiety connection:

The less you have in life, the less you have to worry about. However, achieving a simple life can be easier said than done. Meditation helps internalize the benefits of simplicity in life, and therefore makes it possible to not only desire simplicity but make it real. An immediate result of making a decision to focus on simplicity is anxiety relief, because you instantly have fewer problems you must address.

Meditation advice for seeking simplicity:

1. As you meditate, visualize life without the extras. What can you do without? Would you really miss those things, or would there be more room for joy as your possessions decrease?
2. Increase your meditation focus on intangibles, such as love, beauty and peace, instead of giving mental and spiritual power to possessions.
3. Give yourself permission to trade the joy of having for the joy of not having.

 

08 MEDITATE TO SEE YOUR PATH

The quiet appreciation of the total situation and its inherent possibilities steadily moves things toward resolution.

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Ram Dass

The meditation/anxiety connection:

Focusing too narrowly on stressful problems can bog down the mind and heart and keep us from moving forward. The harder we try, the more muddled everything becomes and the more anxious we feel. The key to clarity is to slow down and think positively about the big picture. As you meditate on the big picture, you begin to see how things fit together – how you fit into the world. This brings peace and anxiety relief.

Meditation advice for seeking clarity:

 

1 Choose a mental picture that represents the complete situation you are facing; this image helps your mind retain its focus on the big picture, instead of getting lost in details.
2 Allow your subconscious to work on the situation without your participation; you will be surprised how much can be solved when you let fears work themselves out.
3 At the end of your meditation, focus your mind more concretely on any solutions or ideas that rise up and write them down to think about later.

09 MEDITATE TO LET THOUGHTS GO BY EASILY

Well, if I can’t stop thinking, maybe I can just let my thoughts go by without getting all caught up in them. Feel the breeze on your face or your neck? See how it’s going by? You’re not all hung up with it. You don’t have to see where each breeze goes. Make your thoughts like those breezes, those little breezes…just going by.

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Ram Dass

The meditation/anxiety connection:

Anxiety rises as we wrestle with thoughts. The harder we think, the higher the anxiety. Especially if thoughts are negative or fearful, it can be difficult to let them go. They carry a compelling presence. The trick is to choose something else as the focus of your attention and imagine your anxious thoughts are light and airy. Acknowledge them as you would a light evening breeze, then let the breeze blow on by.

Meditation advice for letting thoughts go by easily:

1 Imagine you are simply a passerby, noticing your anxious thoughts as a part of the landscape, then moving your attention to another object that makes you feel better.
2 If you are unsure which thoughts are causing anxiety, begin your meditation, then take a mental inventory of all the people, places and things in your life – notice when the feeling of anxiety appears and let it go on the spot.
3 Some people add symbolic actions to meditation to help them identify thoughts and let them go. Try writing your fears onto pieces of paper, then burning them in the fireplace.

 

10 MEDITATE TO RELAX YOUR BODY

Scientific studies of Indian yoga masters demonstrate that meditation can, in fact, slow the heart rate, lower the blood pressure, reduce the breathing rate, diminish the body’s oxygen consumption, reduce blood adrenaline levels, and change skin temperature.
http://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/exercising-to-relax

The meditation/anxiety connection:

Anxiety and stress cause the body to tighten up, breath to quicken, and arteries to narrow. Nothing in our bodies works as well when we’re feeling anxious. Then, when we are not feeling well physically, we just keep feeling more anxiety. Meditation for anxiety breaks this vicious cycle by creating a state of mind in which the body naturally and easily lets go of all the tensions and anxieties blocking your ability to relax.

 

Meditation advice for relaxing your body:

1 Read about yoga and the ways it delivers us from contact with pain. One good resource is B.K.S. Iyengar’s Light on Yoga.

2 Meditation can be used to relax the body and promote healing after major surgeries or traumatic physical events. Meditation is often an official part of recovery protocols.

3 If you have trouble relaxing muscles, try first clenching them tightly as you breathe in, then releasing all the tension as you breathe out.

11 MEDITATE TO STRENGTHEN YOUR FAITH

I have the sense that as your faith gets stronger, you keep needing less and less, and when your faith is flickering, you keep wanting more security. But as your faith gets stronger, you just keep letting it go and letting it go.

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Ram Dass

The meditation/anxiety connection:

What do you need to have faith in? Yourself? A power greater than yourself? Your circumstances? A future path? As faith grows, it fills voids and blasts away depression. As you experience fulfillment, as Ram Dass did when he spent a day with the his guru Neem Karoli Baba, your anxiety will wither away. Meditation techniques strengthen faith by making time and space to connect and open your heart.

 

Meditation advice for strengthening faith:

1 Familiarity strengthens faith, and time breeds familiarity. To grow your faith, dedicate regular amounts of time meditating specifically to nurture your faith.
2 Don’t push too hard to feel faith. Pushing only creates more anxiety and stress. Doubts and questions are a part of the process – simply open yourself to faith and let it grow.
3 If your desire to strengthen faith relates to a specific person, source or situation, maximize your results by meditating on a mental or physical symbol that represents the object of your faith.

12 MEDITATE TO CULTIVATE MINDFULNESS

The interesting thing about cultivating mindfulness in golf [as an example] is that what you are cultivating is a part of your mind that is noticing the rest of the game, the rest of life … is noticing everything else that’s going on … is noticing, ‘Now I’m speaking’. The ‘noticer’ is not the same as the ‘speaker’; they’re two different things. This has no judgment; it’s just noticing how it is.

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Ram Dass

The meditation/anxiety connection:

Mindfulness means becoming aware of everything around you – the sights, sounds, smells and feel of where you are and people you’re with. Make no judgments. Simply allow yourself to see, hear, smell and feel. Mindfulness meditation provides perspective and breaks the cycle of worry and anxiety that happens when your focus is clamped down on narrow thoughts with no connection to the rest of the world.

Meditation advice for cultivating mindfulness:

1 Mindfulness is one of the best ways to use meditation for stress and anxiety relief. Think of it as giving yourself permission to slow down, connect and take a break from worry.

2 If you find it difficult to sustain attention as you meditate, try visualizing yourself from above. Watch yourself meditate and notice everything around you in the room.

3 Mindfulness inevitably expands your awareness of other people and enhances your relationships, which tends to relieve anxiety and stress.

13 MEDITATE TO RELEASE JUDGMENT

When you go out into the woods and you look at trees … some of them are bent, and some of them are straight, and some of them are evergreens, and some of them are whatever. And you look at the tree and you allow it. You appreciate it. The minute you get near humans, you lose all that. So I practice turning people into trees. Which means appreciating them just the way they are.

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Ram Dass

The meditation/anxiety connection:

It’s hard not to judge. As humans, we almost can’t help ourselves. We instinctively know it’s not right to judge, so we end up judging ourselves! All of this judgment causes anxiety and unhappiness. You can use meditation to release the judgment and anxiety you feel, allow others to be who they are and let go of responsibility for them. Not having to judge is a big relief, and it frees us to focus on more peaceful things.

 

Meditation advice for releasing judgment:

1 As you meditate, briefly acknowledge every judgmental thought that comes into your mind, then simply release it and refocus on your meditation.
2 In your meditation, practice witnessing without judgement. The more you practice, the easier it will become to replace judgment with compassion.
3 Consider exploring karma yoga, which focuses your meditation on serving others rather than judging them, then offering your service as a devotion to achieve greater peacefulness.

14 MEDITATE TO ALLOW EMOTION

Getting lost in your emotional reactivity just digs a deeper karmic hole. So you cultivate a quietness in yourself that just watches these things coming and going and arising and passing away. And you learn not to act out your emotions, but just to appreciate and allow them.

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Ram Dass

The meditation/anxiety connection:

Stress and anxiety are made of emotion. We feel this pain both physically and mentally. Sometimes we pull pain to us because it’s familiar. Other times, we strain as we push stress and anxiety away from us, but the harder we push, the more they grow. The secret is to embrace these emotions and others, such as depression, by focusing on those feelings, then learning from them and moving forward peacefully.

Meditation advice for allowing emotion:

1 Stress and anxiety often result in panic. If you are overwhelmed with panic, begin your meditation by simply observing your emotions without trying to figure anything out.
2 Sometimes it’s hard to figure out exactly what your emotions are. To better understand your emotion, first concentrate during meditation on the feeling without giving it a name.
3 When a strong emotion arises, take three breaths into the center of your chest (your spiritual heart) and allow the emotion to dissipate like a wave when it hits the shoreline.

15 MEDITATE TO REMOVE DEFENSE MECHANISMS

The nature of a defense mechanism is that most of it is underground and you’re not even conscious of it. It’s just acting on you, from a deep fear. To me, it’s a little bit like skimming soup when you meditate and get really quiet, and then, in the quietness, stuff starts to come up. If you’re quiet enough, you sort of skim it off the top as it comes up.

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Ram Dass

The meditation/anxiety connection:

Everyone gets defensive. Our defense mechanisms sometimes keep us from being able to honestly face our fears and anxieties, which creates additional anxiety. Through meditation, we can more clearly see our defenses and skim them off, which immediately reduces our anxiety because we are then able to see our fears clearly, be more honest with ourselves and realize we are moving toward improvement.

Meditation advice for removing defense mechanisms:

1 After reaching a state of quiet through techniques of meditation for anxiety, mentally state your intention to identify and remove your personal defense mechanisms.
2 Once you have identified your defense mechanisms, practice letting them go and then returning to an awareness of your breath.
3 The next step is to work on the fears your defenses were masking.

16 MEDITATE TO HEAR THE SILENCE

My universe involves using silence and not waiting for something to happen, because the silence is what’s happening, because you and I come here seeking truth and the best I can understand it is that truth is not conceptual, that what you can think about isn’t the ultimate truth.

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Ram Dass

The meditation/anxiety connection:

Anxiety and stress can be caused by a feeling that you should understand the truth about things in your life, along with the conflicting belief that you are not capable enough to really know the truth. Use the quietness of meditation to open yourself to a truth that doesn’t need to be put into words. You can reduce your anxiety right now by being okay with whatever part of truth you see in this moment of silence.

Meditation advice for hearing the silence:

1 It stands to reason that many truths about the universe go beyond the inadequate words of human beings. As you meditate, notice thoughts and feelings you can’t describe.
2 Rather than looking for answers, allow yourself to observe the ideas that come to you during your meditation for anxiety and wonder about them.
3 To further reduce your anxiety and stress, consciously let go of any expectations you have of yourself to understand the truth and explain it to others.

17 MEDITATE TO ACHIEVE A HIGHER STATE OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Meditation practice isn’t about trying to throw ourselves away and become something better. It’s about befriending who we are already.

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Pema Chödrön

The meditation/anxiety connection:

Anxiety and stress are tiring. After a while, we just want anxiety – life in general – to loosen its grip and let us rest. When destructive feelings become extremely intense, many people just give up. But you don’t have to give up. Meditation is easy. You can find peace and transform your energy the very first day you try it. Then, as you continue to practice, you’ll learn to sink even more deeply into an anxiety-free state.

Meditation advice for achieving higher states of consciousness:

1 If you are interested in achieving higher states of consciousness, such as insight into your own true nature, you may want to seek a teacher who can help train you in deeper meditative practices.
2 Don’t try to do too much at once. Trying too hard will only cause more anxiety. Remember, the silence and quietness of meditation is where things really happen.
3 To deepen your ability to use meditation for anxiety relief, continue reading and learning. Practice meditation regularly and open yourself to possibilities!

How to Use These Meditation for Anxiety Tips

There is no right or wrong way to practice anxiety meditation. To get the most from these meditation-for-anxiety tips, first select one of your favorite meditation techniques. Then, read through the list of tips. Note which tips speak to you-the ones that seem to connect with the anxiety and stress you are feeling. Next, choose one tip to focus on. Read the quote, summary and meditation advice. Take a few moments to internalize the information, then follow the advice as you begin your session. You will feel immediate relief from anxiety, even if you simply feel better because you are taking action. Finally, follow the same process for each tip that connects with your anxiety and stress. If you like, research online to find a specific guided meditation for anxiety relief, and focus on the same topics. You will no doubt have further work to do to achieve full anxiety relief, but meditation for anxiety can provide a great beginning!

www.ramdass.org

By Rick Solomon

 

Just today in the New York Times there was an opinion piece by Paul Tough entitled To Help Children, Coach Their Parents about research on young children who were at high risk for developmental and behavioral problems in Jamaica. What did they coach the parents to do? Promote more educational activities? Nope. Use techniques to help children improve their behavior? Guess again. Play more? Yes! Parents in one arm of the research study were coached to spend time enjoying being with their child in a fun and interactive way with long term positive impacts on I.Q., less aggressive behavior and better self control.

 

Recently, a colleague of mine, Erica Christakis PhD in her just published, best selling book called The Importance of Being Little called for a return to playfulness as the best way of helping the pre-school child educationally. She referenced our program, The PLAY Project’s Autism Early Intervention program, as an example of how play can help children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD).

 

Play and autism? Can children with autism learn to play with others? The brains of children with autism have disorganized, under-connected, neuronal networks. It’s like having a loose net of brain cells that let’s the complexity of the world fall through, that drives these children have repetitive, stereotyped, and obsessive interests—the opposite of play. It explains their lack of interest in socializing, even with their own parents! I can’t tell you how many parents have told me how sad it was not to be able to connect with their own child. When it comes to their developmental course, children with ASD are their own worst enemies—seeking isolation and sameness. They do not play well with others. The saving grace is something called ‘neuronal plasticity’ the ability of the brain to form better neuronal connections through experience. We just have to find our way to play’s neuronal structures within the brain of children with ASD.

 

It can be done. Children with autism—like all children—have so much potential!

 

After 25 years of working with children on the spectrum and 15 years of being the medical director of The PLAY Project, I can testify to the power of coaching parents to use the power of play. The PLAY Project is one of the few, proven national programs that uses play as a primary intervention for children with ASD. Through coaching parents in playful ways we not only help the adults connect socially with the child, but we help the child’s development and social interaction. Most important of all, through play we helped the child’s autism symptoms improve!

About the author
A leader in the field of autism, Richard Solomon, M.D., has more than 25 years of experience working with thousands of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder and their families. In one of the largest and most rigorous research studies in the U.S., The PLAY Project was shown to be evidence-based; parents can learn to improve their relationship with their child and children in the study showed significant improvement in several measures of development. He has worked with Mr. Rogers, T. Barry Brazelton, Stanley Greenspan and Ivar Lovaas. He is currently in private practice as a developmental and behavioral pediatrician in Ann Arbor, Mich.

You can read more about Dr. Solomon and his book in the press release here or visit the website for more information.

By Joan E. Childs, LCSW

She was breathtakingly beautiful, brilliant and bewitching!  She was passionate, powerful and precocious.  Her power to heal transcended anyone’s imagination.  She was a goddess, a seductress, a sleuth, seeker of the truth and transformer.  Pamela was a magician and worked her magic on all the wounded souls who had the good fortune to be in her presence and professional care.  She was relentless to a fault, persistent, driven by internal forces that were challenging to temper.  She stood her ground no matter the consequences, drew the lightening to herself to exorcise her patients who had been ravaged during their childhood.  She was Joan of Arc, Mother Teresa, Helen of Troy and Pami Annie Daisy, all rolled up in one sensational being.  She was a loving sister, a dedicated therapist, a compassionate friend, her Daddy’s little girl and my precious daughter.  We lost her to bipolar disorder and a dysfunctional sub-standard health system that today, still exists.

October 1 was her birthday.  She would have been 53 years old.  Our lives were changed forever on that fateful morning eighteen years ago, when her mental illness pushed her out the window of a 15 story building.  Pami would never have made that decision.  She loved life, her family, friends, colleagues and clients, who until today, have never forgotten her life force and the impact she made on their lives. Her mental illness won the battle for life.  It sentenced her to death. It invaded her brain like a midnight stalker that slowly, surreptitiously, and steadfastly eroded her thought processes to believe she had been chosen as a mediator between God and Lucifer.  She had been made to believe that the devil was going to take her soul and cried out for help that never came.  Instead, she fell through the cracks of a system that failed her and so many others with mental illness.

How could that have happened?  Why did she plunge fifteen stories to her death? What were the tortured thoughts that executed that decision?    I will never know.  I will never get closure.  This I have accepted.  I will never have the answer to those questions and more; this too I have accepted.  What I can never accept is the apathetic attitude our country has towards mental illness.   I made a choice never to be a victim.  I made a decision not to accept being just a survivor.  I chose to be a Phoenix, like the mythological bird that rises from the ashes to make a mission out of my loss; a loss that affected so many others and a loss that is pervasive in our country.  I want to eradicate the shame and stigma from mental illness.  I want to be a change agent for everyone who struggles with bipolar disorder and other mental illnesses.  I want to help families who have lost a loved one through suicide due to a mental disorder.  I want to help the families of veterans who lost their husbands, wives, fathers, sons, mothers and daughters.  Twenty-two veterans commit suicide every day.  This is an epidemic and must be treated.  Post- traumatic stress disorder is a mental illness that can and often does, lead to suicide.

Pami’s life and death must have meaning.  Her work and unyielding devotion to her patients must be honored.  It calls for action.  It calls for conscious raising.  It calls for help.  No longer can we look blindly away from reality.  No longer can we ignore the 6 plus million people in this country who suffer from bipolar disorder.  No longer can we look away from the 40, 000 suicides a year.  No longer can we maintain denial when we know that suicide is the second leading cause of death among young adults from the ages of 18-25.  It is the 10^th leading cause of death in the US.  There are more suicides than homicides.  How can we remain indifferent? Passive?  Disinterested?  It is only when we encounter a loved one who suffers from a mental illness do we become militant in our quest for help.

When the children of Sandy Hope Elementary were murdered by a madman, the parents became vigilant in their effort to raise the conscious awareness of gun control.  It was when Peter Craig Alderman, the 25 year old young man lost his life in the World Trade Center on 9/11 that his parents became advocates for change and created a foundation in honor of their son’s truncated life.  It was when John Walsh’s young son was abducted and murdered that he became a vigilante for finding predators.  We all chose to become a Phoenix.  We all chose to make our children’s lives matter.

I wrote this blog two days after Pam’s birthday.  I was reflecting on the impact she made on other’s that eighteen years later, when I announced her birthday on Facebook, more than one hundred responses were yielded, all of whom remembered who she was and what she did to make this world a better place.  It is way past midnight as I close this blog.  I was driven to post it before too much time passes since it was posted on Facebook.  She would have loved to have known the impression she made on others and the legacy she left to those who knew her well.

Happy Birthday Pami.  From all of us who were lucky to have known you.  May you rest in peace.

By Brenda George

Chapter Nine

Totally Isolated

That first weekend after the treatment was the hardest, as I had to be isolated from my family to ensure that they wouldn’t be exposed to the radiation. They each stayed with different relatives for two weeks. This was my weakest moment, and yet I had to stay completely alone. For about a week after the treatment, I noticed foods had a funny, almost-metallic taste. My mouth was also dry, so I had to drink a lot of fluids to stay hydrated and to help my kidneys remove the unused, radioactive iodine from my body. Eating sour candy like lemon drops helped. I started back on my thyroid medicine the following week and was allowed to eat a regular diet again. It took me a couple of weeks to get my appetite back. I started to regain my strength and appetite one day at a time. Every woman knows, especially if she is a mother, how important it is to have some time just for yourself. No matter how much we love our families, everyone needs a little space once in a while. It’s a mother’s deepest longing. Evenings can be especially hectic with small children not to mention downright insane with teenagers. From about 5:00 until about 9:00 p.m. is what I could almost painstakingly describe as the valley of the shadow of death. I won’t even talk about evenings with teenagers. They have such chaotic schedules, and their music; we won’t even go there. I can hear it now, even as I write, that pounding bass, in tune with every heartbeat. I’ll save that for another book. It can drive a sane person crazy and wreck their nerves for a week. Do you remember that commercial, “Calgon, take me away”? The one where the mom is taking a relaxing bubble bath as she is trying to escape her world for a little while? I admit that I’ve been guilty of yearning for that much-needed quiet time. I used to think, “If I could just watch a good movie without any noise and actually see the end of it, or read a good book straight through, or sleep as long as I want to”. I’m sure you understand what I mean. But after being isolated for two weeks, I completely changed my mind. Like the saying, “Been there, done that,” being alone was not nearly as glamorous as I thought it would be. There are only so many movies that I could watch, and only so many books that I could read. When I realized that, day after day, I was really alone, and no one would be walking through that door, it gave me plenty of time to contemplate that being alone was pretty lonely. Being alone began to take on a whole new meaning. I probably got carried away, because I even made my family take our dog away. One day when I was feeling sorry for myself, I was elated to realize that my granddaughter’s goldfish was still there. I remember saying to the fish, “Prince Charming, we’re in this together.” See, I told you I was lonely! I was so glad to see something else that was living and breathing. Sometimes, something as small as a goldfish can lift our spirits.

I was overly cautious about everything. I was afraid to even light a candle, and could just see the headlines in the newspaper, “Lady used as a bomb to test nuclear weapons following radiation treatment.” You’ve got to admit, we hear some pretty bizarre things on the news these days. Now that it’s behind me, I have to almost chuckle at my naiveté, but at the time, it was a real concern. I had never been sick a day in my life, so it was a learning process for me. Although I can usually find humor in almost any situation, this was one experience where I couldn’t. That was a time in my life that I will never forget. It was not only difficult for me, but for my entire family as well. I did a lot of soul-searching, praying, and learning to yield my life to God’s keeping. At that time, I didn’t know the results of the treatment or even if it had been successful or not. In the back of my mind, I went over and over all of the “what if’s. What if the treatment didn’t work? What if I need another one? What if all of my hair falls out? What if my family has to stay away longer? What if I’m too sick to take care of myself? And the final “what if”; What if I die? Those thoughts were never-ending. Two weeks before Christmas, when most people were out shopping, I was home alone, too sick to do anything about it. I cried a lot as I listened to some of my favorite Christmas songs like “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” and “The Christmas Shoes,” because they only magnified my loneliness. I didn’t realize before how many Christmas songs were about being home with your loved ones. My mom was like a Christmas angel, filling in wherever she was needed. Brent took Travis to school on many snowy mornings. Mark kept working hard on his printing job, and his family helped as much as they could. My kids all tried cheering me up every chance they got.

We waved and blew kisses at one another from my front windows as they drove up and sat in front of our house for a little while, just to feel like they were home. They dropped off cards, pictures, and flowers. One card I’ll always remember played the song, “I Will Survive.” They even brought my favorite Starbucks drink, Strawberry Iced Frappacino. Savannah, my little granddaughter, was four years old at the time, and couldn’t understand why I was all alone and why they couldn’t come in. She thought everyone was mad at me. That took some careful explaining. The ladies from church brought one meal after another, and I received many calls from neighbors and countless gifts and cards from friends. I realized how God had carried me through the storm when it was next to impossible to go on by myself. The famous poem “Footprints” came alive for me with a deeper meaning, as I realized that God had carried me at this terribly low time in my life. The last few lines of the poem had the most meaning, “The times when you have seen only one set of footprints is when I carried you.” I was now beginning to understand the depth of God’s love.

Keep and guard me as the pupil of your eye; hide me in the shadow of your wings. Psalm 17:8

thus says the Lord: restrain your voice from weeping and your eyes from tears, for your work shall be rewarded, says the Lord; and your children shall return from the enemy’s land. and there is hope for your future, says the Lord. Jeremiah 31:16-17

 

Rejoicing Though the Tears

By Brenda George

 

The URL to my website:

rejoicingthrough.com

 

The Link to my blog:

http://brendageorge.authorsxpress.com/

 

by Roger Housden

 

Change itself is the one certainty we can be absolutely sure of. You might say this is obvious. We all know this already. Except that we don’t, or at least we don’t often act as if we do, when change arrives on our doorstep. We may have lived for years as the lead character in a story that has enabled us to feel secure in our job, in our family relationships, in our place in the world. Or we may have lived for decades secure in the story of our suffering, the injustice done to us, the bad hand we were given.

 

Either way, our belief in the story is what creates some sense of a solid identity, which in turn gives us the illusion of security. But then the house of cards can fall at any time, as we also know from our experience, which is why, deep down, however rosy our picture may seem, a constant vein of subliminal anxiety about what might happen next is likely to be running through us.

 

Our life is already, even now, slipping through our fingers. So given that nothing we are familiar with, including ourselves, is going to last, how can we live another day without breaking out into a cold sweat?

 

We can bow to whatever passes across our landscape. We can trust the inscrutable intelligence of the life that is living us, as it is showing up for us, in this very moment. If it is sorrow, let us make friends with sorrow. Let us not drown but swim in the waters of sorrow. Naomi Shihab Nye, in her wonderful poem “Kindness,” says that if you are ever to know what kindness really is,

 

You must lose things,

feel the future dissolve in a moment

like salt in a weakened broth.

 

Why does she say this? Because the experience of loss brings us close, not only to someone dear whom we may have lost but to the whole of humanity; for every individual has and always will know loss. Loss breaks the heart open, and when the heart breaks open we become a kindness to ourselves and to the world.

 

In the great themes of life — love, loss, parting, and death — poetry can surpass scripture in slipping the visceral experience of a deep truth into the bloodstream. It feeds the imagination with shimmering images more than the mind with the letter of the truth. In his Sonnets to Orpheus, Rilke urges us:

 

Want the change. Be inspired by the flame

Where everything shines as it disappears.

(translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy)

 

Exquisite image! Why does he exhort us to want the change? Because change is the way it is. We harbor notions of what is good for us and what is not, and try to organize and strategize accordingly. Yet life does what it does without concern for our preferences, so Rilke is urging us to look beyond the parade of circumstances and events to the fundamental fact of change itself. In wanting the change, we are aligning ourselves with truth, with what is already happening.

 

We flow rather than self-consciously make our way. In that flow, the sense of who we are and where we are going becomes more malleable and fluid, more responsive to the conditions around us instead of bound by fixed beliefs and agendas. In the flow of change, we forget ourselves, and a deeper remembrance emerges — the remembrance of being always and ever joined to a greater life — not as an elegant concept but as a lived experience in the moment.

 

So Rilke is urging us to want the change that is happening, to embrace it, whatever it is. If we are in the middle of a divorce, let it be that. If we have lost our job, let it be that, and if we are dying, may it be so. Of course it’s not easy. Nobody willingly allows herself to be dismembered, torn apart, crushed like a grape between the fingers. The ego will never assent to the sacrifice of the story it has so lovingly tended. The impulse must come from something else in us, another organ of awareness, you might say, that knows somehow, however much it hurts, however much we may be on the rack — a sacrificial lamb, it may seem to us — that what is happening is true, necessary, inevitable, and ultimately, therefore, good. .

 

# # #

 

Roger Housden is the author of Dropping the Struggle and numerous other books, including the best-selling Ten Poems series, which began in 2001 with Ten Poems to Change Your Life and ended with Ten Poems to Say Goodbye in 2012. Visit him online at www.RogerHousden.com.

 

Excerpted from the book Dropping the Struggle: Seven Ways to Love the Life You Have. Copyright © 2016 by Roger Housden.