Stepping out of the Game...Or Just Roar Like a Lion

My five year old son told me that some older kids were chasing him on the playground. The game was cops and robbers. He was always the robber and the other kids were always the cops. I asked him if it was fun, he said it was, but sometimes he got tired and wanted to stop, but he couldn't because the kids would then catch him and bring him to 'jail' (the sandbox). I tried to advise him that he could just stop playing. If he stopped running...they wouldn't chase him. "But mommy, they'll catch me and bring me to jail." "Don't go to jail" I said. "Go do something else". He looked at me like I was crazy. It was obvious to me that he could simply step out of the game, but to him that was unfathomable.

We grown-ups do this all the time. We get stuck in a story, a game, an argument that happens again and again with our spouse or sibling. We play our parts in the story. We feel it is inevitable. We respond in the same way we always did. We don't realize we could just stop playing the game.

I asked my son a few weeks later if those kids were still chasing him. "Sometimes" he said, "but I figured out how to make them stop when I get tired. I roar at them like a lion and they leave me alone." He did something unexpected, he broke the pattern, he changed the game. "Good for you" I said. "Good for you"

We Always Work for Ourselves

We always work for ourselves, no matter who hands us our paycheck. If you go into work tomorrow knowing you ultimately work for yourself and everything you do is yours, you will have a very different day than if you spend the whole time thinking about what other people want and expect of you. People will react differently to you. You will own your day.

Even if you do work for yourself, know that you don’t just serve your client, or your kids…you serve yourself and the work itself. Your boundaries are yours, no one else’s. Your skills are yours. Your creativity is yours. Your responsibilities are yours. We need to get paid for our work, but your boss and your client will be happier to pay you for better, more confident work. Your kids will know boundaries and have a happier parent and you will feel empowered every day.

What Did You Eat Today?

What did you eat today was the classic question my mother asked anytime I expressed any emotion besides happiness. If I was sad, frustrated, annoyed, depressed or certainly angry, ‘what did you eat today?’ was the classic response. This wasn’t completely out of the blue or inappropriate. We kids had an allergy to artificial colors and flavors that caused us to be very cranky and irritated whenever we ate them. Of course it wasn’t the best response to validate a kid’s legitimate feelings, but it did teach me that there was a physical, chemical cause for the emotions I felt, and even to the thoughts I thought. It wasn’t until I met my husband, (the son of a therapist and a psychologist), that I learned that talking about your feelings could actually make you feel better. I really had no idea. I thought that was a myth. But my mother gave me quite a lesson in the biology of emotions. I realized in college that when I would be feeling off because of something I ate, it would actually affect the things I thought. I would imagine terrible things happening like the gas station I was walking by would blow up and kill me, or someone would jump out of the bushes and stab me 27 times with a switchblade. This realization made me wonder if there were other, less dramatic, influences to my body that were also effecting, not just how I felt, but what I thought.

It’s ironic that that concept has so dictated my exploration of pain in the body. I realize in retrospect that this idea of exploring emotions in the body was something I had been working on in many forms for a long time. When I was a choreographer in San Francisco in the 1990’s the big piece I was working on was about emotions. It was an exploration of the contagiousness and physical manifestation of emotion through the body and face. It was about that time that something happened that changed the course of my life and work. I developed chronic pain.

I fell in a dance class and hurt my pelvis. It didn’t heal. I developed bursitis and tendonitis in my left hip which hurt all time and got worse and worse. It was, at the time, a terrible experience, but in retrospect taught me a tremendous amount about what it was like to have chronic pain. What it does emotionally, what it’s like to see lots of doctors who can’t help you, what it does to your relationships and motivations, and most importantly, led me to explore why it develops, how it stays and how to heal from it.

Running in the Rain

I was coming out of the library the other night and a man walked by me quickly saying "At least it's not raining too hard, I thought it would be pouring". I replied, "No, this is just a tickle rain...very gentle." I watched him hustle by, crouching over, rushing...as if it were coming down in buckets, repeating "I thought it would be pouring". It was hard not to giggle at the obviousness of the reality that to him it was pouring. His whole body was prepared for being drenched. It's hard to let go of our negative expectations, even when the reality is more to our liking we tend to get stuck on the expectation. We like to be right, and even though it's better that sometimes we're wrong. Let it go. It's just a tickle rain.