If I had been nervous about my test last night, these things would have been charms  to help me do my pattern right, but since I had prepared adequately for a change, I was wearing the green as a celebration, as a badge of confidence.

But when I first planned on my green hair and nails, it struck me that I do little rituals, carry ‘charms’ and call on the universe* for help in a somewhat superstitious way on a fairly regular basis** and I began to wonder why.  It’s not an OCD thing (my crazy doesn’t manifest that way, usually), and I can do these things without the charms and rituals so it’s curious but not worrisome.   I don’t believe in the Law of Attraction*** so I’m not really thinking that I conjure up success with these things, but they do help me on some level.

The key to figuring it all out came when I reread an email from Marianne Elliot of the 30 Days of Yoga program I’m doing. In her note, she mentioned certain ritual type things you can do (burning incense, lighting candles, playing music) to put you in the right frame of mind for your yoga practice.   The email made me think about my charms and the like, and made me realize that the objects and rituals are part of my preparation.  They’re anchors holding me in the mental space I need for the activity at hand.

Lighting the candle in my ‘create’ candle holder puts me in a good space for writing,  painting my thumbnail green would help me focus on my punches and blocks instead of any nervousness, calling on the universe reminds me that I need to ask for help, or that I need to let go of my need to control, just lean into whatever is going on and trust that it will work out.****

So, my charms and rituals are a way of creating a space for the task, and pulling my concentration back to that task when needed, a way to remind myself about something important.

Now I feel a little less silly about my approach.  Creating space to accomplish things is vital, and I should use any tools I have in order to do that.

Do you have rituals, charms or potions to help you with challenges? Does my use of these things still seem superstitious to you? Do you use prayer to help you with challenges instead? How do you view prayer in that context?

*I don’t practice any organized religion, but I believe there is power in the universe above and beyond individual human power. That may jibe with your feelings about God, do with it what you will.
**And I am passing it on to my kids too.  I have a little leather bag full of courage/luck charms that they wear when they are feeling nervous, I draw a red dot on their fingers so they can ‘focus like a laser’ when they are having trouble settling, and I recently told The Boy that caffeine gave you extra math abilities so I gave him a shot glass of pepsi before bed so he could be ready for his math test in the morning.  I ‘fessed up afterwards on that last one, though.
***I was on board for the positive stuff, in the sense that once you tune in to something, you notice more examples of it (like when you buy a red hat and suddenly the world is full of red hats) so you can take advantage of opportunities that come your way.  I couldn’t get on board for the negative though, I can’t buy that rape victims vibrated on a frequency that brought on their attack, and I refuse to blame genocide on the victims either.  Glerg.
****So the dots on my kids’ fingers reminds them to focus, anchoring them in the task at hand. Their little bag of courage lets them draw on their own courage without having to ‘find’ it.

I completely understand all of that, and the reasoning behind the structure. The problem is, of course, putting it into action. 

I’ve broken down my goals into small steps, and laid those out on my calendar, milestones to meet on a long journey toward whichever goal I’ve got on my radar at the moment.  But I still haven’t really gotten far with a lot of them.  Instead I spend a lot of time reacting to stuff that jumps out at me from my To Do list, or via phone call or email.  It’s not an effective way to work and it can be rather demoralizing.

I get big projects done, but usually by concentrating my efforts for a few days here and there. Even my NaNoWriMo novel involved me writing 30,000 words in two days – I impressed myself, sure, but it is not a sustainable way to work.  And I sure as hell can’t exercise that way, and it will never work for my business.

So we come to the question I’ve been driving myself nuts with for years.  How do I actually apply myself to those small goal steps?

I’d like to say the answer came to me in a vision, or that I had a great revelation after reading a work of genius but it wasn’t that exciting.

Instead, I was putting some dates in my calendar for AAMP  and pulling back from the deadlines to see when I’d have to do promotion for those events. As I entered the promotion schedule into my google calendar, the program was setting each work topic as an event, usually an hour long one.  I was shortening those promomotion schedule ‘events’ to 15 minutes when it hit me:  I was actually going to need an hour to do the promo work – why not leave things as they were?  Even if I had to move the timing around on the actual day (or even the actual week), at least I had allotted time to do the work.

And then I was hit again (I should learn to duck ).  I had allotted time to (say it with me) DO THE WORK!

You see where this is going, right?

All this time I’ve been breaking things into steps (even teeny tiny ones so wee that they can’t even be described as baby steps), and I’ve been attaching them to dates as deadlines but I haven’t been allotting time to actually (say it again!) DO THE WORK.**

This has, of course, been complicated by the fact that I haven’t had a lot of work time in the past few years.  The time I did have I often frittered away in trying to choose what was most important to do at that moment.*** So scheduling time to do specific goal work hasn’t been the only factor in not getting to some of my goals, but it’s been a big one.

So can you guess what I’ve been spending this last week of Planuary doing?

*Apparently the new acronym of choice is HARD (snicker) but that book won’t get here until next week, so let’s run with this, it’s just the opener anyway.

**I’m sure I’ve read somewhere or at least been told about this, but it never got translated into something to do until now. If I go back in my archives and discover that I’ve discovered this before and didn’t act on it, I’ll be really annoyed.  Best not to go delving into my archives, I guess.

***I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve gotten to the end of an unproductive work session only to realize that if it is all equally important it doesn’t matter where I start. Glerg.

My own personal version of that law became ‘If you can’t smile, then try not to throw up.’ – much more do-able for me.  And while I couldn’t articulate it at the time, I think part of my irritation came from the feeling the as a girl, I was supposed to be sweet and kind and never angry or upset.  Perhaps that’s not what the writer of the law intended, but I get that feeling from it even now.  *shudder*

I hate those sorts of sayings*,  a pat little description of how someone is supposed to behave without any reflection on the individual circumstances. 

One I’m struggling with right now is ‘Start as you mean to finish.’

How the hell am I supposed to do that when I don’t know what the end is going to look like yet?

Sure, I can see how it’s consistency is valuable, and I can see that it would be good to know where you’re going before you start but it’s not always possible – and it can really cause someone like me (always looking for the perfect system) to get stuck because I can’t start the way I ‘should’.

How does starting the way the way I mean to finish allow for growth?  How does it address the changes and obstacles that alter our plans?

Sure, I’m probably asking too much of a saying, but I expect a lot of words and this group is failing me.

I have a lot of big plans for this year, but I’m not starting as I mean to finish.  I’m starting where I am and seeing what happens.  I’ll aim for consistency, work toward finishing my projects, but I refuse to get so caught up in the method that I can’t do the practice.

I have no idea how I’ll finish – so I’m going to start as I mean to start – one tree at a time.**

* Another one that gets me is the one about how God doesn’t give you anything you can’t handle.  That actually hurts my teeth.  Seriously? So much presumption and shut-up and take it, all in a few words.  Sure, on the one hand it’s telling you that you have the strength to make it through, but it also makes it sound like you were given this trouble because you’re strong. Grrr.

** You remember, of course, that I have a backward forest and trees problem – it’s not that I can’t see the forest for the trees, it’s that I forget the forest is made of trees and I only see that giant, scary, dark mass and think I have no way to deal with it.

I will be introducing some specific visualization practices in a few days, but for right now I am just going to talk about visualization in general.

I’ve always had trouble with it.  I just don’t have the power to see myself in my mind’s eye.  I don’t know if that is because I am more of a word-oriented person or if I haven’t honed the skills to visualize in that way.

But, like I usually do when I can’t do something, I read up on it.  And not only did I discover that a rich description (no problem!) that you repeat over and over can serve a similar purpose, but thanks to Shakti Gawain’s Creative Visualization I discovered a way to put myself into my mind’s eye.

Now when I visualize something, I write a rich description first, and then I use Gawain’s suggestion:  I visualize the situation around me and instead of trying to see the whole thing like a movie, watching myself, I visualize it like I was there.  I am seeing the richly described location through my eyes, I can feel the textures and fabrics, I can hear the noises,  and I can see my hands doing the actions I am trying to practice.

This is different than trying to picture my whole body in the scene, because unless I am in front of a full length mirror, I rarely see myself that way.  But I always see my hands doing things, and I feel things like blowing air upwards so my hair puffs out of my eyes, so I can more easily imagine doing things if I create a scenario where I watch my hands, or feel that common action.

That’s what I suggested for a friend of mine who was having trouble with stress at work last year.  She was juggling so many projects with so many details that she was bringing her work home with her, in her head.  Here’s the basic scenario that I created for her:

I suggested that she imagine herself doing the usual things she does when leaving work, except before she stepped out of her office she was to imagine picking up a heavy stack of binders that contained all the notes, mental and physical, that she had made on each project.  I told her to think about how heavy they were, to think about how her arms would ache from holding them, how she would rest her chin on them to hold them in place while she walked.

Then, when she stepped out of her office, she was to imagine she was in a long corridor that had appeared between her door and the door outside, and that the walls of that corridor contained a number of small alcoves, the perfect size for a binder.  As she came to the first alcove, she was to shift the weight of the binders to one arm, and use the wall to support them so she could take the top binder off the pile and place it in the alcove.  When she did that, a label would appear above the alcove so she could identify what binder it contained when she came back for it.

I told her to repeat that for however many binders she imagined she needed.  And then when all her binders were safely stored, she was to imagine stretching her arms, or rolling her shoulders to relax from the effort of carrying the binders and then walk out the front door, relaxed, knowing she could pick up where she left off when she returned to work.

Of course, she had to fill in the details herself, what her office looked like, what she was wearing, the sounds of her shoes on the floor, what her office smells like, so she could visualize it more fully, make it more real.  But the scenario helped because she had a concrete, if imaginary, way of putting down the burdens of work before she went home.  And she didn’t have to be able visualize her whole self to do it.

  I’m going to have lots of visualization advice on this site over the next while, but if you need something more I offer a paid service for custom visualizations - click on the ‘Services’ link above.

Kabat-Zinn says (and I’m paraphrasing here) that it is okay to struggle with focus and to have to bring yourself back to the contemplative state over and over again.  You will find it easier sometimes and harder at other times, but there is no point in beating yourself up because thoughts occur to you while you sit in meditation. 

Minds generate thoughts, it’s their main work (I think he likens it to the ocean producing waves),  but you can learn not to get caught up in them.   But even if you do, bringing yourself back to a gentle focus on your breath (or whatever you have chosen to focus on) is part of the practice.

Aside from learning to accept thoughts as part of my practice, I have also learned to accept that I do not need to do a long practice in order to benefit from meditation.

For the last 45 days, I have done a short meditation (5 minutes or less) each day and it has made a big difference in my daily life.  I feel like I am a little more grounded and I have a little more patience to drawn on. 

A little more patience is a great thing when you have to help two kids navigate their days and I found mine on Youtube. 

Yes, in addition to videos of people behaving like idiots, Youtube has a huge selection of meditation videos.  Just search for the type or length of meditation you want to do, find a comfortable spot, and begin your practice.

I’ve even gotten away with meditating at my kitchen table, wearing earphones,  while my sons play in the living room.  Sure, it’s not ideal, and it’s probably not going to lead to enlightment, but I am not seeking enlightenment at the moment, I just want to quiet my mind a bit. 

Hopefully, the time will come when sitting for longer practices will be possible, but in the meantime, five minute practices are helping a lot.