what is she doing on Monday nights anyway?

I posted last week about how I was making some very slow but still perceptible progress.

I've made some more since then. Today I finished the main part of the first thing I needed to do. There's more to do, but I feel pretty optimistic, because this slow but perceptible progress continues.

I have tried to do a number of things (career-wise) in my life but always came up against this same obstacle, this same mental block, after a while. In all previous attempts I have just said "to hell with it," and gone on to something else. But teaching is different. I really want to do it.

So I have been determined to figure out how to work my way through this obstacle. Not dodge it, not trick myself out of it, not fix it with a band aid, but work through it, because I'm sick of allowing my life to be limited by it. I don't know what to call it, but it's real and it's there.

A BIG part of this work is my attempt to develop a new relationship with work, a new model of what it feels like to work (posted about this before last April).

I've been trying to undo my old m.o., where I have a war in my head between an abusive authority figure ("get your ass in that chair, you lazy selfish spoiled brat! what the hell is wrong with you? you're ruining our whole life!") and a rebellious child. ("NO! I won't and you can't make me! I hate you!")

(This used to work for me as long as I just obeyed the abusive authority figure. College friends will remember me whipping myself into a frenzy every semester. But once I stopped being willing to endure the self-inflicted cruelty, I stopped being able to accomplish anything, because I didn't have another way to even say to myself that it was time to work.)

The agonizingly slow but definitely perceptible improvement is, I think, largely attributable to a couple of things. (1) The use of a bunch of different techniques to reduce my anxiety level (relaxation, EMDR, etc.) and (2) All this Buddhism stuff I've been reading lately.

Specifically, the Buddhism stuff takes a completely new approach. Ang asked a while ago what I'm doing at "meditation" on Mondays, so I'm going to try to describe one aspect of it.

Therapy, psychiatry, addictions all take the approach of trying to fix something—trying to make discomfort go away, trying to be/feel better.

Buddhism says that that's impossible, basically. Sickness, aging and death (along with disappointment, embarrassment, frustration, headaches and other unpleasant experiences) are inevitable parts of life.

That sounds really gloomy, I know—I tried to talk to Loopy about it a couple days ago and she looked at me in alarm—"What, are you turning into Sylvia Plath??!?" Well, it's not saying that there aren't a lot of pleasant experiences too!

But the paradoxical thing is that this perspective is extremely helpful and even relaxing.

The idea is that when we fear and avoid discomfort, we are acting as though we are too weak to handle it—as though we won't be able to endure it. Essentially, we are teaching our animal brain that pain and discomfort are like death, and that at any sign of them, we have to run, or hide, or Do Something to block the feeling.

So we feel weaker and weaker, and our "comfort zone" gets smaller and smaller until we can hardly move for fear of feeling pain.

It's conditioning, like with Pavlov's dog.


But that's good news. My anxiety isn't a Character Defect. It isn't a DSM Diagnosis. It's just training. So there can be re-training.

And the re-training is simple, tho of course not easy.

When I'm uncomfortable, that doesn't mean that anything is wrong. I'm not about to die. So I don't have to react with panic and fear and set about in a frantic attempt to grab something that will make me feel better. Instead I can just be uncomfortable.

This gives me the space to look calmly at the situation and, if there's something I should be doing differently, try to do that, but if not, then just accept that the situation is uncomfortable. (Anyone reminded of the "Serenity Prayer"?)

So I'm teaching myself that discomfort (even pain) is not unbearable, and that I am strong enough to endure it. To do that, I have to practice not giving in to compulsions—the compulsion to stop work and go play with Flickr, for example, when I start to feel discouraged. I have to practice experiencing discomfort and not running away from it.

So that's what I was describing doing last Tuesday—practicing not running away. It was really great to find that I could actually do that. I didn't put the feeling into words then, but looking back I felt incredibly victorious.

But to do that, to stay in the uncomfortable situation, I have to stay in the present moment, stay mindful.

That's what meditation is for—to practice enduring when we feel like escaping, and to practice staying in the present moment when we would rather start thinking about yesterday, tomorrow, anything else but now. To practice sitting in one place when our brain is saying, "this is stupid, this is boring, I've had it, I give up."

It involves silly little things like not scratching an itch (during meditation). It's called "refraining." Just refraining from scratching the itch, noticing that I feel like "I can't stand it, I have to scratch!!!!" and still not scratching. And eventually, I realize that my brain was lying to me when it said "I can't stand it!" Because I can. Whaddya know.

Oddly enough, it seems to work. Over time, the bigger "itches," like "this paper sucks, I can't stand writing it, it makes me feel stupid, I have to go do something else!" can also be resisted.

I don't know if I'm explaining it well, but anyway, it works for me.