No. 90 - Woo-woo is real

I don't care what you say

From a 1988 art school sketchbook

I walk to my exercise class, theoretically, five days a week. I say theoretically because I don’t always make it there every day. If I have an appointment, or if I’ve slept badly, or if I’ve imbibed alcohol the night before due to something social, I might not make it to class. Let’s say sometimes five, often four days a week.

My walk takes me about twenty minutes through the streets of my neighbourhood. It’s the Oaklands neighbourhood of Victoria, BC, and I’d call it mixed. Some heritage homes, some 1960’s boxes, and everything in between. Apart from crossing one busy street my route is quiet, and there are lots and lots of trees. I don’t pass a ton of people.

I don’t pre-plan this, nor does it even cross my mind beforehand, but this walk is a signal to my brain that it’s time to practice what you might call mindfulness.

Sadly, “mindfulness” is one of those words that’s become meaningless from overuse. We’re numbed to words like mindfulness, gratitude, abundance, or self-care, causing us to discount them immediately upon hearing them. I do it, too. Mindfulness, bla bla bla, who gives a fuck. What does it even mean.

What it means to me on my walk to exercise class is that I attempt to be present—awake and alive, but not lost in thought. In the moment, for moments at a time. It’s fleeting, and before I know it I’m caught by thoughts again, but my efforts count. I do this because I’ve noticed that when I practice meditation, and tending to my nervous system, and these moments of mindfulness as I walk, it adds up. The effects start to seep into my every day and I feel less reactive. I fret and catastrophize less. I’m calmer. No, I’m not all zen or whatever, but it provides me a better baseline for living in this world.

I might listen carefully for birds and any other sounds that appear, while also paying careful attention to each of my footsteps. I might pay close attention to my breath, as I do in meditation. Or I might put my focus on the crown of my head—which takes me away from thinking—while imagining a cord running from the base of my spine to the centre of the earth. I learned this technique somewhere or another. Sometimes I tune into the trees I’m passing and try to feel their energy.

I’m not saying I know what I’m doing… that I know how to “feel energy”. It doesn’t matter. My efforts count.

Sometimes I’ll make my gaze wide and attempt to conceptualize everything surrounding me as it actually is—inseparable from me. Atoms atoms atoms. The world all one fluid soup, and me but one cooked carrot walking through it. Sorry, what? Yes, that’s how I sometimes conceptualize nonduality in my mind, as I’m walking—as soup. So sue me.

I rarely talk about these things, and I’m clearly ill-equipped to describe them. Yet they constitute an increasingly important part of my life.

Meditation

I did some sleuthing and was reminded that I started meditating with the Waking Up app in 2018, buying a lifetime membership in 2019. This is when I moved beyond my numbed/couldn’t give a shit attitude toward mindfulness, and started actually trying to practice it. I stuck with meditation until mid-2022, at which point my partner and I experienced a lifequake (new term I just learned) and I fell out of practice for a couple of years.

I was also reminded that I wrote about these things in 2019 and yeesh, it was even worse than “carrot-in-soup”.

From the Waking Up website:

Meditation is more than just relieving stress, sleeping better, or improving your focus. While Waking Up can help you do all of that, it’s more like a whole new operating system for your mind. It can open the door to a deeper understanding of yourself and a new way of being in the world.

This “whole new operating system” is what I’m practicing when I’m walking to exercise class. And of course, when I meditate. The practice, as research has shown, makes physical changes in your brain. You know, neuroplasticity. This is all backed by science, baby.

I don’t mean to be proselytizing. Please no! I just wanted to write about what I’m actually thinking about these days. As I proclaimed to my beautiful friend Jeanne when she bought me dinner for my birthday recently, “Woo-woo is real!” Granted, there were wine pairings involved, but that makes it no less true. She knew what I was talking about. It became the catchphrase for the evening, Jeanne declaring that it should be on a t-shirt.

I mean, are we really going to keep insisting that the intellect is the only game in town? I don’t know about crystals, or astral-traveling, or wearing magnetic bracelets. I only know, the older I get, that being as much in my body as I am in my head and trusting my gut is the shit. That meditating and tending to my beleaguered nervous system really helps me. I’m not that good at it yet, but I’m practicing.

ADDENDUM:

When I was pregnant with my daughter thirty-two years ago, I had a friend who warned me that I should be careful what kind of music I listened to because the fetus could hear it. She suggested that something like Enya might be appropriate. I laughed and said that sounded pretty counter-intuitive, since listening to Enya would probably make me angry. We didn’t want that for the baby, did we?

She also disapproved of the curtains I’d made for my unborn child’s room: the fabric was a jolly vintage-inspired duck-hunting motif, and I loved it. There were some rifles in there, but who’s counting? That fabric was great. Any baby would love it.

All to say… there is no formula. Yes, the fetus can hear you, but there isn’t one kind of music that’s okay for baby. I’m not trying to prescribe anything in this post. I’m just finding my own way, which is all I can do.

Ruined by a duck-hunting motif, 1995

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A lightbulb moment

Boy in Tub, collage, from the early 2000’s I believe

My partner David owned and ran a house-painting company for 12 years, but as of January 2024 we no longer have employees and he now works very part-time or does consulting work. When the company was down-sized, my income as “chief cook and bottle washer” in the home office was cut in half. To be clear, my job was part-time and didn’t pay a lot to begin with.

A lot of things changed in our lives as a result of the downsizing of the company, and I didn’t initially think much about what those changes would mean for me specifically. Our finances were suddenly in disarray, but so was everything else. With hindsight I’m starting to understand that my drastic cut in income on the crest of becoming a “senior citizen” was actually quite cataclysmic for my poor little mind. The future looked very bleak—I saw a life of food stamps, pinching pennies, no new books and certainly no travel. Okay, food stamps is an American thing and I don’t even know how that works. But I watched enough TV growing up to know that food stamps is not where you want to be in life.

It was a time of fresh panic and I felt trapped as a caged rat. Sometimes, even though you can see what’s happening to you and that you need to chill out because you don’t actually know what the future holds, it feels impossible to relax the grip of fear you’re in. I’m sure world events didn’t help matters.

It was a big life change for us and it’s taken time to adjust, but the fresh panic has subsided. We don’t have a ton of retirement savings, but we do have a house, and the house has a suite that we rent out. A few months back, our tenant gave his notice, which at the time felt like very bad news.

Funny how things can change from one day to the next. To condense this story to where it needs to be, we now rent out the suite for day use. This was initially an amazing turn of events because it meant that David could practice music at night and on weekends without worry of disturbing anyone. Huge news.

Then at some point I realized that I could potentially benefit also. I’d recently held my journaling workshop Taking Note: Creating Ourselves Through Journaling at the beautiful Aunty Collective, and it dawned on me that maybe I could use our rental space to give workshops on weekends, if our renter was open to it (she was!). You know the trope of a lightbulb coming on inside someone’s head? It was precisely like that. Suddenly there was more light. Lots of it.

There aren’t any guarantees about how this whole workshop thing is going to go—there’s no way of knowing how it will unfold. But simply seeing potential and possibility where previously I saw none—where what I saw was a towering, impenetrable metal wall—improved my mindset instantly. What a difference a day makes.

I started with monthly collage workshops. I held the second one on May 17th, and it was kind of a revelation. I’ve always thought of myself as an introvert, and I think I am, but last weekend I felt the power of a group of people coming together and doing something enjoyable. I consider my role in what participants end up producing to be minimal, but to be in any way facilitating the process feels really really good. Who the hell knew?

I hosted a few workshops in the distant past, but I don’t think I was relaxed enough or confident enough in what I had to offer to reap the rewards. Last weekend I felt it. Happy relaxed people. Passing on some things I know how to do. People pleased with what they’d made. Huzzah!

Upcoming workshops in Victoria, BC:

• Monthly collage workshops (next up: June 21st!)

• Journal Collage (read the description here)

• Taking Note: Creating Ourselves Through Journaling

From the comfort of your home:

• Collage Class download!

• Taking Note download!

THANKS EVERYBODY!

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SOME STUFF!

• Oliver Burkeman on Aliveness!

• Lynda Barry: The Answer is in the Picture

• Andy J. Pizza’s Creative Pep Talk - what to do when forward motion feels stalled

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FROM THE ARCHIVE!

No. 82 - The alchemy of an idea

No. 80 - The One Indiscriminate

Taking Note No. 5

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