Using Pain to Improve Life

Since my last post my life has taken a turn for the unexpected. I developed a literal pain in the butt that extends from the cheek down to the calf. Ouch!! Boy does it hurt. Hurts to sit, stand, and walk, which leaves lying down, but I can’t afford to do that all day, so I sit, stand, and walk, wincing (gasping) all the way.

After checking to ensure that a pinched nerve or my back isn't somehow involved, my doctor prescribed a powerful anti-inflammatory and some exercises. There’s no quick fix for this, and the pain wears me down by the end of the day. The silver lining is that I’m using the pain as motivation to work on some areas in my life. 

First, I figure that the body has an enormous capacity to heal itself as long as it’s not sabotaged. I’m helping by eating as healthily as I know how, with plenty of food high in antioxidants and anti-inflammatory properties. Guided by George Mateljan’s The World’s Healthiest Foods, an “essential guide for the healthiest way of eating,” I am learning the health properties of different foods and the best way to select, store, prepare, and cook them. 

Anti-inflammatory foods and herbs include salmon, tuna, and shellfish, pineapples, papayas, olives, garlic, ginger, and turmeric. There are others, but that’s where I’m starting. Yesterday for lunch Kat and I ate avocado halves sprinkled with lemon juice and stuffed with tuna salad (a recipe from the book). Tasty! 

Second, having this grinding, relentless pain actually helps with my mindfulness practice. Sometimes the pain overwhelms, and I have to stop and just breathe deeply. I try to follow the advice in the book to focus on breath and welcome any discomfort or pain instead of fighting it. It’s not easy, and it doesn’t always help, but most of the time it seems to. It keeps me from panicking anyway. Anxiety magnifies pain, and to the extent that mindfulness practice diffuses anxiety, it helps.

Third, I am forced to practice patience. Not a virtue of mine, but one I want to cultivate. The healing process takes time. I can eat all the right foods, exercise diligently, and take my meds, but I can’t force the pain away or hurry the healing process.  Impatience — when will this pain end? — like anxiety, just makes it worse. 

So there it is. I wrote most of this while standing at our kitchen island, and finished it off sitting at my desk. My new life for a while. I hope that when this chapter of life draws to a close, I will have acquired or deepened a few good habits.

Breaking Rules and Re-visiting Goals

Just back from a whirlwind visit home (near Houston) to visit my folks. The trip is exactly three hours and twenty minutes from my door to theirs. Most of the time I have to make a pit stop along the way. When I take Dobby, I stop off at a rest area so I can take him with me into the restroom.

I pulled into a rest area as usual and for the first time noticed a sign that clearly stated “No Pets Allowed in Restroom.” What?? But I can’t leave him in the car! What if he were stolen? And during summer months the car interior heats up far too quickly. Impossible to leave an animal in a car, even with the windows cracked. I might have to disguise him as a human baby and carry him in a pouch. Think it will work?

Time to check in with April goals:

Create a routine, writing at least three hours every (work) day. Still no routine, but I did manage the floating three hour period on days I wasn't on the road, plus more on occasion.

Close e-mail during writing sessions. Yup. 

Close internet during writing sessions, or use internet blocking or my alphasmart. Nope. The internet is like chocolate to me - irresistible. I cannot bring myself to use an internet blocking program; I don’t know why I even wrote that down. I haven’t yet unearthed my alphasmart. I really like typing on my laptop. A lot. And I use Scrivener. Though I know I can transfer my alphasmart stuff to Scrivener, I like working in Scrivener. So, I’ll have to figure this one out. I suppose if I’m hitting my writing goals (I’m now into daily word counts for my fiction), I can ease up on this one.

Practice mindfulness. I googled for some resources and came up with a bewildering number of books and blogs about mindfulness. Finally I downloaded Mindfulness for Dummies to my Kindle, figuring it would give me the basics. So far I like what I’m reading, but I’ve only just begun putting it into practice (as in yesterday). I plan to review this more fully in a future post.

I will now turn these goals into May goals. They’ve been helpful, and I want more time with them. 

The Backside of Company

Company has come and gone. A few days of hectic high energy plopped into my mostly placid life.

My niece and two nephews are 17, 15, and 12. They like to play games, and play we did -- some of the classics like Sorry and Yahtzee (and Battleship with my niece), and hours of a card game called Golf. It’s funny how much we love board games and cards, but I’m sure they play as often as Kat and I do, which is never, when we’re not all visiting each other.

I was proud of myself for achieving peace in chaos. There was a time when my siblings’ visits would jangle my nerves to the point that I couldn’t fully enjoy them. I’m not used to the energy that children bring, and I would spend some visits counting down the minutes to departure time.

Several years ago, I decided that I had to change my attitude and become more tolerant of disruption and noise and messiness, or I would miss out on the fun of being with my nieces and nephews (I have ten total). They were growing up, and I was growing old.

So I did.

Through prayer and journaling, and a lot through psyching myself up before a visit and choosing to let go and enjoy the craziness, I’ve found the visits to be more and more fun. Some of it may have to do with their age; most of them are teenagers now or close to it, but I can tell that some of the inner work is paying off.

So the visit was great, but now Kat and I are struggling a bit to get back into routines. I’ve had meetings that were postponed until after the visit and smushed all together at the end of the week. The house is messy, my grocery situation is out of whack, and I’m flying without meal plans. I have another long meeting tomorrow morning, and an event I’ve organized Sunday afternoon that, along with church in the morning, will take the day.

It’s push-through time, and Monday I’ll take stock and organize myself. Until then, I’ll just have to float along with the disorder and not let it get to me.