Author: Mina

Writer. Playwright. Performer. Citizen. Traveler. Enthusiast. Author of Run Like a Girl: How Strong Women Make Happy Lives and Run Like a Girl 365 Days a Year, plus other stories, books and plays.
Is Enough Abundant?
fitness

Is Enough Abundant?

Mina1 Comment

As the holidays and 2024 approach, I declared the start of my personal new year on October 28th. The day after the one-year anniversary of my mother’s death, in a year of substantial loss—in addition to my mother there was the loss of my beloved 17-year-old cat, the loss of my 28-year marriage, the loss of my home and financial security and the (thankfully temporary) loss of my health. All of which I’ve written about here during the course of these last months.

I want to look forward. And, I’m struggling to feel like I’m enough, that my life is enough and, to put it bluntly, that I have enough resources. What does enough even mean? And how about this business of abundance? Abundance is one of the words of the moment. I feel inundated by invitations to reframe my thinking, to have an abundance mentality. Most days now, I fail to have an abundance mentality. Enough feels like a stretch goal.

Recently, I’ve been listening to Beautiful Chorus chants when I meditate. One of my current favourites is I Am Enough, which I often follow with their chant Abundance. After all, I’m not against abundance. I would like to have an abundance mentality. I just can’t seem to achieve it. I notice the chants feel different. My body yearns toward enough, as if my cells know that I’m enough and want me to know that I’m enough. And my body often resists the abundance chant, as if my cells don’t believe that abundance is possible, or that the whole notion of abundance is just a quick fix fad or worse abundance is greedy.

Egg carton from Abundance Acres Farm with sunflowers from the farmer’s market, too. It turns out I’ve been buying abundant eggs.

Or, are enough and abundance actually the same thing? Maybe if I could truly feel like I am enough, then I would have achieved that elusive abundance mentality. Are they both just different ways of expressing a feeling of wholeness?  This is a philosophical cycle that could end up with me dancing on the head of a pin with the angels. My mother used to say that when my father would come back from synagogue with a story of an extended debate about, say, whether using a light switch was allowed on the sabbath. She’d say, “Now it’s just angels dancing on the head of a pin.” And, as I wrote this, I wondered, where did her saying come from, only to learn that it refers to tedious religious controversies from the middle ages.1

Enough with the angels. Let me get concrete.

I’ve faced some health challenges lately. So, I’m even more acutely sensitive to my level of energy when I run, or really do any physical activity. Over the many months of slower and slower runs, as my energy depleted, I had re-calibrated my expectations. Just getting out was enough. At first, as the medication returned me to the energy level that I was accustomed to in the past, every drop of extra ease and speed in my body felt like abundance. Now, only a few weeks later, as I settle back into the new-old normal, I notice that feeling of abundance recalibrating back to enough. In other words, I see my mindset shift. As if abundance is an unstable state and enough is the stable state. Abundance is an overreach. I couldn’t possibly merit abundance and anyway it’s a fickle, fair-weather friend. I’m scared that if I relate to my energy as abundant (versus enough), then it will be taken away.

To which the universe offered me this: Feeling frisky on a recent run, I picked up my pace, only to ping my hamstring. Really? The universe can’t let me have a quick run? I need to be put in my place that fast? As if proving my point about the unreliability of abundance.

Sigh.

And then I noticed that right behind the frustration was another feeling. Oh the joy, to be running fast enough to ping my hamstring. There was a part of me reveling in the privilege of the ping. And I had a glimpse of the abundance mentality. Being alive and running strong is enough and abundant. The universe invited me to let the feeling fill me up. And then reminded me not to get attached.

Maybe that’s the difference between the two—I am enough, even if I don’t know it all the time. Everyone is enough. As they are. Right now. We can’t be attached to enough. We are. It is. Whereas abundance happens in the moments we notice that we are enough or that what life has delivered to us is enough. Noticing that causes our cup to run over. To know I am enough, or that what is is enough, is abundant. And it’s hard to feel so fulfilled and not get attached and want that feeling of enough-ness to last. That’s the slipperiness of abundance.

Or not. I may still be dancing with the angels.

Three examples:

  1. I accept a 25% pay cut to continue doing work I love, that feels meaningful, because the company is in a tight spot until it finds more investors and/or earns more profits.
  2. I get the news that my kidneys are functioning normally, after months of alarming blood tests.
  3. I arrive at the Citibike stand, needing an e-assist bike, because the ride home is long and I’ve already danced for 2 hours. There are plenty of e-bikes docked at the stand, but all are red lighted and unavailable, except one, which also has enough charge for the distance I need to go. I cruise home in the autumn sunshine.

Enough or abundance?

  1. ↩︎
When Depression Glues Me to the Couch
fitness

When Depression Glues Me to the Couch

Mina7 Comments

I’m in my mountains. Truckee, California. I call them mine, because I’ve been coming out here for three months a year for the last 14 years. And, usually, they are my happy place. A chance to slow down, to be more connected to nature than usual. To be on trails—running, biking or cross-country skiing.

But things are different this time.

I’m in the house I own with my ex. Filled with memories and my failure. What’s wrong with me, that I could not hold my 28-year marriage together? The house, with its lovely mountain view, is also a reminder of what I do not have anymore—financial security (I wrote about that back in March here). The house will either be sold, or my ex will keep it. In either event, I will, at least temporarily, lose the connection to nature that has nourished and sustained me for so many years. Yes, I acknowledge that I lived with great privilege. And, I wish I were a better person, a black belt in non-attachment and gratitude, able to move on with ease. I’m not. Instead, this is all depressing.

And there’s my health. A new diagnosis of Addison’s Disease, which continues to involve increases in my medication, as my potassium does not seem to want to settle down into normal range (I wrote about that last month here). My energy has returned, but the ongoing stress of regular blood tests, bad results and worried doctors is also depressing.

And it’s October—normally I would have come out to the mountains in the summer (and then again in the winter), but I couldn’t bring myself to come this past summer. My failed relationship felt too raw. Now I’m here, and I see that I have not healed enough. The grief rushes in, threatening to drown me. Plus, it’s cold (2 degrees Celsius) and dark in the mornings (we did a group post about the challenge of fall dark here). This past weekend was not only cold, but also a drizzly grey.

So, getting off the couch has been hard. I feel glued to the familiar, sun-faded fabric, where I used to spend easeful hours reading with my cat curled up close by. I lost her in April. Instead, now I’m watching endless Netflix, clicking on whatever the next show is that the algorithm proposes to me, too lazy to even choose. Reading feels too hard. My attention flees the page with restless lethargy.

As for getting outside in the mountains? Why bother? All this supposedly healthy outdoor exercise and I still ended up with a disease. An inner critic tries shaming me off the couch. You lazy piece of crap, you’ve got nothing better to do. Another voice in my head tries berating me off the couch. Just get the f*&%#k up. Fruitless.

Except.

Then there’s a quiet, gentle voice, barely audible at first. You will feel better. I promise you. You love the mountains. It’s never been about the exercise. It’s about joy. I retort that joy is impossible. Yes, the gentle voice says, that’s true. I won’t promise you joy. But being out there will be a tiny bit better than being glued to the couch. You don’t have to go for long. You don’t have to go hard. Go outside. Take some breaths of fresh air and be with the trees you love. Netflix will be here for you when you get back.

The gentle voice convinced me on Saturday. I went out mountain biking. My first day of the season, which is barely the season anymore. I felt less tentative than expected, given my sticky bum, so recently unglued from the couch. If I was in a better mood, I might have said that I felt bolder than expected. But I didn’t feel bold. I just didn’t feel scared, as I’d anticipated. There were even passing moments of almost-joy.  Moments I overcame obstacles. Moments of flow. Moments when I danced with my bike. There were the trails, too. Familiar. Beautiful. Peaceful and wild. That’s enough. For now. A glimpse of the possible. In the future.

Given my experience on Saturday, I thought it would be easier to get out on Sunday. It was not. The glue set hard overnight and the couch would not let me go. A new voice in my head had all sorts of excuses. It’s foggy, rainy and cold, it could be dangerous on Castle Peak. There might not even be anyone else out there. Extra risk. It’s a whole different world now if something happens to you. A medic-alert bracelet isn’t much help if there’s no one to find you in the first place. Plus, there won’t even be a view. Why bother?

Again, the gentle voice intervened. She made several deals with me. I could finish my latest television binge first. I didn’t have to run the trail, if I didn’t want to. I’d take extra medication with me. I could listen to my book, Entangled Life, by Merlin Sheldrake, about all things mushroom. I’d turn around if it seemed dangerous, no shame.

Toward the top of Castle Peak in fog and Mina at the summit.

My bum had racing stripes from tearing away from the couch. I worried it would re-affix to the car seat and I wouldn’t get out when I got to the trailhead. Even as I got out of the car, I had doubts. Tears hovering in the wings. The first comfort were the cars in the parking area. The benefit of having been couch bound and coming hours later than I normally would. I wouldn’t be completely alone. I set off at a hiking pace, promising myself that I’d only run when I felt like it. Which turned out to be within 100 meters of starting. Every so often on the first half of the ascent I’d scale back to a hike, only to find that my bodymind wanted to keep running. Running felt better. As I reached the final steeper sections of the ascent, I moved into a fast-hiking pace, which is all I’ve ever really done in those bits, since it’s faster (something I learned when I was doing long trail events). At the top, the fog closed in on every side. There was snow on the spindly trees and shrubs still clinging to the rock at 9,000 feet. Unusually, there was no wind, so I could hear the ticking sound of small clumps of snow falling to the ground. Looking over the edge, the drop down to the valley below seemed even more precipitous than usual, because there was nothing there. I was inside the clouds I’d seen from below.

My last day on Castle Peak and I could see no further than a few feet in front of me.

The perfection of the metaphor was somehow comforting. I told myself that I was going to be okay, even if I had no clue yet how that would happen. I lingered on what I could see. As I listened to Merlin Sheldrake talk about the complexity and phenomenal resilience of lichens, I took in the bright green lichen on the rocks, geological time made manifest. My life, a blink of an eye.

Then the chill overtook me and I knew it was time for me to head down. I started at a slow run, re-discovering my agility as I went, recovering my confidence with every step and every misstep I navigated, until I hit cruising speed. Again, there were brushes with joy. Grief rinsed through me, too. I got back to the car with a sense of energized calm. I will be okay. It will take time. I will be okay. It will take time. I will be okay. It will take time.

Back home, the couch was cleared of glue. I could sit and read a novel. I know this is a cycle. I hope it is a spiral, in which each time I’m glued, I can remember sooner that getting outside helps clear a tiny portion of the clouds of depression. And even the itty-bitty-est more ease is something, after all.

In this way, I’ll climb toward the light.

Does a Diagnosis Change Who I Am?
death · Fear · health · illness · mindfulness

Does a Diagnosis Change Who I Am?

Mina8 Comments

Two months after an emergency visit to the hospital for 3 days (which I wrote about here), I’ve finally been diagnosed. I have Addison’s Disease. So, not enough for me to have a name for what ails me. It has to declare itself a disease. That causes a lot of dis-ease for me. There’s a strand of thinking that says we are empowered once we are diagnosed. Along the lines: Knowledge is power. Now you know what you’re dealing with. And that classic marketing tag line: If it can’t be measured, it can’t be managed. With a diagnosis, I’m in measurable territory. There’s a map. I can manage.

I should be relieved.

Instead, I feel defeated. I’m not yet able to accept that the price of staying alive is medication for the rest of my life. Before, when my condition was nameless, I could imagine it being easily solved by the integrative medicine protocol that I undertook with great optimism. In fact, the calculated risk I took in going off of the prescribed conventional medications did not, at least in the short term, work out. I had imagined myself proudly declaring to my medical doctors that I’d been off the medication and wasn’t my healing capacity amazing. Instead, I ended up with blood work results that clearly indicated my body spiraling toward another emergency visit. I could feel the deterioration happening. The exhaustion coming back. Instead of my smug satisfaction with the medical doctors, I was contrite, owning up to my infidelity to their recommendations. As the endocrinologist said, I can’t impress on you enough how important it is that you take these medications seriously, if you want to stay alive.

I do. Want to stay alive.

Most days.

My energy rebounded quickly after getting back to the recommended protocol. And, I feel ridiculously fragile. Death accompanies me everywhere. Sure, I know in that mindfulness way that, I could die at any moment. Now this consciousness is not about mindfulness, it’s the knowledge that if I stop putting these little pills in my body three times a day, then my heart will quit. Some days, I hold the pill in my hand and toy with the idea of not taking it, of letting nature take its course.

I wonder if my vitality even counts anymore. My energy is so much a part of my identity. If it’s not real, am I a fake? Who am I?  

I understand that the fact that I have not been on medication before now is a massive privilege. I was not nearly as aware of that privilege as I am now. I understand that what I write here risks triggering people already on medication. You have every right to think, Get over yourself.

I had distanced myself from the possibility of disease. That won’t happen to me, I thought. I took credit for my health; thought I deserved it. After all, I exercise, eat veggies, sleep, meditate … you know, all the things we’re supposed to do. Right? Then my adrenal system stopped functioning. For no discernible reason. Except … these last 18 months have been stressful—my 28-year marriage dissolved; I lost my financial security, my home, my mother, my cat; and now, the cherry on top, this business with my health. I’ve written about the mountain of grief here and the psychological toll of my financial insecurity here.  I haven’t even gotten to the perilous state of the world. 

A loud inner critic attacks me: You failed to manage your stress. This disease is all your fault. More. You deserve this disease, because you have not had adequate empathy for others’ illness, because you were so cossetted in your healthy person privilege. You have brought this on yourself with your hubris, with every time you’ve answered a health questionnaire with the word robust to describe your health. The critic could go on at much greater length, but you get the picture.

A friend of mine, who was trying to be helpful, recently told me that I just needed to shift the narrative in my head. She tried to reassure me by saying that everything happens for a good reason, that there’s always a silver lining and that I need only put a different spin on the events unfolding. My inner critic was delighted to be so affirmed. See, she said, your fault. Oof. I get that my friend and my inner critic have good intentions. They fear that I’ve lost my belief in myself and they want me to pull up my socks. I want to pull up my socks. There’s nothing more annoying than a falling down sock that pesters the foot. Yet, sometimes I just want a caring human to sit down beside me while I take off my shoe and look at my sock and bemoan it’s falling down-ness, as if I were a character in a play written by Samuel Beckett.

At the same time, I actually do want to put one foot in front of the other and I know that will be easier with functional socks. So, even as I still crave the accompaniment and patience of another human, I’ve come up with a sock-friendly narrative I am working on adopting. New narratives don’t happen in a minute.

Here it is: Everything that’s happened in my life, just happened. Not for a good reason. Not with a silver lining. I am grateful to Thomas Moore, the author of Dark Nights of the Soul, for his clear-eyed book, in which he spoke with many people who had been through serious ordeals. Although they had all learned from their challenges, they did not say they wouldn’t have it any other way, or that they were grateful to their ordeal for having awoken them from their slumber. Instead, they said, in more eloquent words than the ones that follow, what happened sucked, I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, and, despite the bad hand I was dealt, I made the decision to grow from the experience and not to fold beneath its weight. The book gave me permission to feel all my grief and rage. Life will serve lemons. We have the right to gnash our teeth and wail or not get out of bed or whatever we need to do to honor and embody the ordeal. What doesn’t serve us is to resist the dark feelings that come with the dark nights. And, the and is key, we then have a choice about how we want to alchemize the lemons we’ve been served. We can bypass and add lots of sugar, hoping to hide the bitter. Or we can make bracing fresh lemonade that cleanses our system.

What is, is. I can either fight against what is, or I can work with it. Some years ago, I had the word compassion tattooed on my arm. It was supposed to remind me to have compassion for others and, crucially, for myself. This ordeal has brought me face to face with the compassion gap caused by the unconscious bias of my previous privilege. My inner critic screams into the gap, provoking an echo response from the canyon walls inside my head. The lemonade opportunity in all this is compassion. So simple. And so not. A super tall, skyscraper of an order.

I have the beginning of a to-do list for this new narrative: I need to begin with a hand outstretched to my critic. After all, compassion, like most things, starts at home. She is working hard to keep me upright and aware. I want, too, to create more ritual around taking my pills, to honor the fact that every time I take one, it’s a conscious choice to live. My friend Lori, who is a Reiki Master, suggested that I infuse my pills with the energy of Reiki and bring to them the intention of receiving their grace into my body as pure light and healing. I had a sudden flash of, Oh, that’s what my levels 1 & 2 Reiki certifications are for. More compassion put into practice.

The last thing that I’ve come up with so far, is to be compassionate with the critic and with all the other voices in my head who are having a hard time: The anxious part of myself, who trembles faced with all the unknowns in my life right now. The grieving part. The demotivated part. All of them.

Just as I long for someone to sit beside me and my falling down sock, I will sit beside my critic and my anxiety and my grief. After all, they are friends who need my support. Earlier in this piece, I wondered who I am and whether my diagnosis changed the answer. I’ve found my way here to several answers. First, I am the same person, with many different, sometimes conflicting and hopefully evolving characteristics. Another answer is aspirational, I want to be a person who sits beside others. And I’ll start with myself.

Now.   

Fear · mindfulness · self care

How Do I Keep Moving Through Uncertainty?

Mina1 Comment

On the morning of June 14th, I went for what was to be a vigorous walk with a friend. About 30 minutes into our walk, we took a set of stairs up and out of Riverside Park. Stairs I’ve walked and run up for almost 30 years, with ease. I was so winded that I needed to take stop to catch my breath. Then I got dizzy and my friend suggested we sit down on a park bench. I started crying. This is what I was talking about, I said. I’d been telling her about my increasing tiredness these last months. The trouble I was having mustering for a workout. Not mentally. Psychologically, I still wanted to move. Very much. And physically, my body was fritzing out on me. That morning I’d felt my physical exhaustion as I lay in bed. My heartbeat was erratic. The way it gets when I’ve had far too little sleep for several days running. I’d already made a doctor’s appointment to check my blood work for a clue about what was up. But it’s New York City. The appointment wasn’t for another month. I’d started taking more iron and a B-complex.  

We’re walking over to urgent care, my friend said. I agreed. Reluctantly. At urgent care the doctor took my pulse and blood pressure and pointed his finger out the door. You need to go to the hospital emergency right now. Whatever is going on with you, it’s beyond what we have the capacity to address here. I don’t remember his name. As I write this, I’m thinking that I want to go back to that office and thank him.  

I walked up the 10 blocks to the emergency department of the nearest hospital. With my note from the urgent care doctor, they whisked me to the head of the line of walk-ins and zipped me through intake. I waited a short time, that felt like forever, for them to take my blood. I sat on the last free chair, that had been wiped free of its streak of … was that shit or blood? I felt tired and frustrated and disconcerted among all the ailing people. Notice that I didn’t say “other ailing people,” because I wasn’t one of them. In my mind.  I was just anemic, or just … something else. A woman next to me on a gurney was sitting up and moaning. Pulling on her clothes and skin and hair. Begging for more painkillers. All the patients, regardless of race, looked like they’d been washed with a patina of grey.  

Then a nurse (was it a nurse?) came and crouched down beside me with a look of urgency. She explained things to that I didn’t hear. About potassium. About my heart stopping. About follow her, please. Now. She led me into the belly of the emergency department and after a search, found a bed to put me on. I was walking. How bad could it be? She was followed closely by a nurse (I know he was a nurse, because I saw him multiple times) who was carrying an armload of syringes and an array of coloured electrical wiring. Things went sideways from there. I was pumped full of many things, which I understood were at minimum saving my heart from severe damage and more likely saving my life. At one point I said to the nurse, trying for lightness, I guess I’m not wasting your time being here. He looked at me and shook his head. You are lucky you’re here.  

I feel lucky now. I felt less lucky in the thick of those next days.  

36 hours in the Emergency Department, which is its own kind of special hell. Bright interrogation room lighting. The sounds of people in distress. Incessantly beeping machines. The clank and clatter of other metal and plastic rolling around. Voices talking about dire situations, like the multi-car accident that landed a slew of people into the ED who needed to take priority over everyone else. From my bed, I could see the resuscitation room entrance where ambulances unloaded. At my angle, I could only see the heads and shoulders of the emergency response teams wheeling people in through the plastic antechamber. Then I’d hear the announcements asking for Ron and Sergey to the resuss room. I imagined those less lucky than me. I want to say it made me feel fortunate, but I was so exhausted and strung out, it was hard to tap into my inner resources.   

Friends brought me necessities: toothbrush and toothpaste, a phone charger, a pillow, noise canceling headphones, slip on sandals; also, pizza and chocolate toward the end of my second day there. Eventually I was moved to a regular floor of the hospital, where I shared a room with one other person and the relative silence was a deafening relief. Every few hours someone came and took my blood and gave me medications. They dripped sodium through an IV, then magnesium. They stripped potassium from my body. There was an urgent request that I drink successive cups of orange juice to stabilize my blood sugar, only to realize later that oranges are a high potassium food.  

I began to feel better.  

They did other tests, too—ultrasound for my kidneys, echocardiogram for my heart. Nothing yielded answers about why my body had tipped into such an extreme imbalance.  

I begged to be allowed to leave. Later, I saw in the doctors’ notes, Patient is anxious to leave. I was terrified by the lack of answers. And I was terrified to be in the hospital.

It’s been a month and a half since that experience. I’ve been washed through by tsunamis of anxiety. I’ve gotten partial, interim answers. Mostly on things that have been ruled out. I’ve seen a kidney doctor who gave me stopgap medication to stabilize my system and who has promised to be available to me until I get to the kind of doctor I need to see, apparently an adrenal specialist. I’ve had a CT scan with IV contrast, which was a trip to another level of hell. I’ve consulted an Integrative Medicine team, who have given me an alternative protocol to heal underlying causes, if I can trust them and have faith in my body.  

I feel shaken to the core. I cry a lot. I sleep, sometimes deeply, and then wake seized by terror.    

A foggy road through a forest … how my life feels. Santiago Lacarta on Unplash

And, in the midst of the unknown, my body has found a fragile interim stability. My energy has started to return. I’ve been able to run and go to yoga and Pilates. I don’t feel 100%, but I feel so much better than in the 2 months leading up to my hospital stay. Friends tell me I should take it easy. I rebel. I asked the one specialist I’ve actually gotten to see (a nephrologist, aka kidney doctor) whether I could be physically active. To which he said, Do whatever feels possible.  

I don’t want to take it easy. I’ve been drained for months. If I have a drop of renewed energy, I want to indulge in it. Revel in it. Be gluttonous. Feast on the energy and come back for a second helping. Moving is my happy place. And my happy place has been relatively inaccessible to me these last months. I’m scared my happy place will move beyond my reach again. I want to fill up on it while I can.  

I am more acutely aware than I have ever been that the future will do what it wants. The best I can do is live fully. Laugh when possible. Find joy where I can. And offer thanks to my body every day it can move me to a sweat.   

fitness

What Does Try New Things Really Mean?

Mina3 Comments

My latest podcast addiction is Dr. Sharon Blackie’s interviews on Hagitude, The podcast is conversations with a diverse collective of women approaching, experiencing or on the other side of menopause.  When it was first suggested to me, I had a moment of What? Who me? Oh no, is that what you think of me? I never lie about my age. And yet, her assumption that it would resonate for me, caught me up short. Brought me closer in on the reality of my age. This is, in fact, a podcast for me, a woman who has gone through menopause. Then, I listened to the podcast. And listened to another episode and another one and so on. Almost everyone had at least a nugget that grabbed my attention. And her interview with Peggy Orenstein  was unusually provocative. I found myself questioning them out loud. In the episode, Peggy talks about the need for women, as they age, to keep being curious. To try new things that we aren’t good at. Okay. Yes, and …

My question: what does she mean by new things? As in, brand new? Or might the newness reside in the very act of continuing things we’ve done for years, in a different way, as modified by age. I was thinking, in particular, about our engagement with sports. That special challenge of staying curious and engaged with a sport, maybe especially one we used to be quite good at, when we can no longer perform at the same level. When we are no longer good at the sport.

Sure, yes, there’s age-adjusted this and that. We rate ourselves now strictly against our cohort and might try to ignore the broader category of all women. I was never a terrific athlete. And, I did my share of road races and triathlons in which I placed in the top five among women. Now? That doesn’t happen. In fact, for the most part, I’ve given up participating in races. Age adjusting was not enough of a palliative. Because, the bottom line is that I am no longer as fast and strong and that loss comes with some mourning.

I am grateful that the loss did not make me want to quit, as I have seen (understandably) with many people I know. I am not the only one to miss my younger self. As I listened to Peggy talk about curiosity and new things, it occurred to me that continuing to engage with a long-loved sport is a genuine and valid version of trying something new. The curiosity comes in figuring out how to evolve the relationship with our bodies and the sport. We can truly inhabit the age-adjustment, making a mental shift that solicits our curiosity. And we can do what I did, which was to change the nature of my relationship with, for example, running. I needed to strip out the competitiveness, even and especially with myself. I had to get back to basics. Back to the why.

The joy of being in my body. And that required curiosity. 

As a side note, I do also try new things—in the last year I’ve developed a brand, new passion for 5Rhythms dance, which I had never before participated in; and I studied Reiki and got my Level 2 certification, with zero background in prior energy work.

And the universe may be asking me to try quite a few new things in the next months. I’ve recently had a too-close brush with my own mortality (more on that may come in another post). This, too, has required a reset around my physical activity (among other things). I am struggling with the issues that arise around my sense of myself, if I can’t just head out for a double digit run whenever I feel like it. Yes, I am acutely aware that to be able to do that has always been an enormous privilege. And it has been a part of my identity. Who am I, if I am not strong in the way I’ve always associated with my wellbeing? What does strength even mean and how can I redefine it for myself? Questions to be explored with curiosity. In the meantime, my relationship with my existing sports is going to transform into something new for some period of time, which may be forever. And I’m considering whether there are new opportunities for movement I might explore. Tai Chi?

My Long-Term Running Relationship with Central Park is Evolving
fitness

My Long-Term Running Relationship with Central Park is Evolving

Mina1 Comment

I have run in Central Park since 1993. I’ll let you do the math. When I first got here, I lived on 113th Street and came into the park at its northwest corner on 110th. Then, six months later, I moved to 85th street and then to Riverside and 79th. So, for 28 years, I have run into and out of Central Park at the entrances on 81st and 77th. One result of the demise of my marriage is that I have gone full circle. I run into the park at its northwest 110th Street entrance again. Welcome home. The cycle of life.  

Except two things—it doesn’t feel at all like home. Not yet. While I still carry inside me that 27-year-old, who learned how to be a runner in Central Park, I am not her. The clock has ticked. I turned 57 a few weeks ago. I am trying to find my new running groove. And it’s super awkward. Sometimes, as I pass my old entrance/exit, my feet are confused when I keep going. Sometimes when I run out of the park, my feet think I’m abandoning my run too soon. Too long. Too short.

Well, it is actually too short. There’s the mile that’s been stripped from every run, because now I’m only one block out of the park and not five long New York City crosstown blocks each way. I’m so tired so much of the time now as a result of the stress that it’s sort of okay that my runs are shorter. And the reduced distance makes me feel old and feeble. Sure, self-care suggests I should be easy on myself during this time. And self-care, for me, is not always doing less. Sometimes, it’s doing more, to remind myself that I’m alive and strong. 

I am surprised by how disconcerting it is to enter and exit in a different spot. I almost didn’t want to write about it, because it felt like such a slight topic. Then I was inspired by the poet Maggie Smith’s piece about google-mapping the demise of her marriage. If I were on Strava, all my statistics would need to be recalibrated to account for my new starting line. The pure physical sensation is strange. For one, I’m starting in the middle of the most significant hill in Central Park. So, I’m either headed up or down. I don’t get to enjoy the full challenge of the ascent, nor the full liberation of the descent. Unless I make a conscious decision to overshoot in one direction. For two, the landmarks take on different meaning. Each one now represents different mile markers in my progress. Belvedere Castle meant beginning and ending. Now it’s at 1.5 miles in or still to go.  The east side 90th street entrance was approximately halfway. Now it’s also 1.5 in or to go. The Harlem Meer was part of all the north hills. Now it means I’ve just started, or I’m almost home. For three, meeting my friend Auditi for a Saturday morning run is a whole different time and distance calculation—including the question of whether to lengthen my usual run with her by 1.5 miles each way, for a total of around 12.5 miles (not insignificant in my current running shape) or ride Citibike to and from our meeting spot.

And all those facts and figures say nothing of the weight of grief. Each place I ran or walked or sat with my partner. We fell in love running in this park. The tree roots and mycelium have converted the residue of our passage into new life. Is our intermingled breath in that small overhanging branch that brushes against my arm as I run by?

In a podcast I was listening to while running today, Katherine May (author most recently of Enchantment), being interviewed by Dr. Sharon Blackie on Hagitude, the show I’m currently addicted to (possibly more on that next month), talked about how joy is only possible when we allow ourselves to live fully into our grief. There is joy in my new relationship to Central Park. Because I arrive into the park beside the North Woods, and because I’ve been tired lately and running shorter, more playful routes, I am spending much more time in the forested bits. On my birthday a few weeks ago, I was up in the woods as my podcast ended. I noticed the birdsong, which seemed unusually vivid. I had noticed the same thing waking up. I stopped running, closed my eyes and soaked up the song, tilting my face to the sky, as if I might catch the scent of the notes. Shortly after I started running again, I came upon a birdwatcher. I stopped to ask him what he was looking at through his gargantuan telescope. There are often clusters of birdwatchers focused on an owl or an eagle or some other extraordinary bird in the park. He said, all of the birds. Then he told me there had been an unusually large migration overnight and that there hadn’t been so many birds in Central Park for years. I took the migration personally. The birds were there to sing me Happy Birthday. My heart swelled to embrace the joy that bloomed alongside the grief. If I hadn’t been living in my new place, I might not have passed that way this day.

Meanwhile, with each run, I write new memories, which will begin to encode their patterns in my feet. Step by step.  

Lying to Myself About Meditation
habits · meditation · mindfulness · WOTY

Lying to Myself About Meditation

Mina

Monday morning. May 8th 2023. I wake up after an unusually restful night of sleep. I know I got up to the bathroom once. Other than that, I have no recollection of sleepless restlessness, which is not the norm for me these last many months. The first thing I notice is the fading rose of the light on the buildings out my window, soft and clear. I am surprised the day is here. I check my iPad for the time. It’s on the bedside table. Reading a novel (on the kindle app on my iPad) in bed as I fall asleep is one of my life’s pleasures.

And, in that moment, reaching for the time, I realize this: I did not meditate yesterday. Horror! How could I have forgotten?

I comb back through the day. It was not my typical Sunday. To start with, I didn’t get into bed until 4:00 am. I was taking part in a big group photo shoot organized by some friends, which didn’t start until past midnight. That same morning, I stayed longer in bed than usual … waiting until the moment before I needed to leave for my 5 Rhythms group at noon. I left my iPad out in a particular location to remind myself to meditate when I got back. But not with a note, as I often do, if I don’t meditate first thing in the morning.

That was May 7th. My cousin’s birthday. He was born 4 days before me. It would have been 1617 days of meditation in a row. 617 days since the last day of the first in-person visit with my mother after pandemic.

My streak!!?? I couldn’t lose my meditation streak, too! Enough with the loss already (I won’t get into the details—I’ve written about them the last couple of months.)

I recalled that while I was lying in bed Sunday morning, I had thought to myself, maybe 5 Rhythms will be my meditation today. After all, Gabrielle Roth, who developed the technique, called it a moving mediation. Still, if I’m honest, I wasn’t thinking about that anymore when I got to the studio. I was just inside my body, inside the dance. So, did it count if I hadn’t thought to myself, in the moment, this is my meditation?

I’ve been meditating daily for more than 4 years now, and I have adjusted my expectations and the form my meditation can take several times. For example, when I started, I required of myself a minimum of 20 minutes. After a month, I relaxed into any amount of time counting, so long as I sat down intentionally. My meditations now are most commonly 10 minutes long. Another requirement was that I be seated—a cushion or a chair (airplane seats count) or a patch of grass. Just seated, you get the picture. Then, about six months ago, when life got especially challenging, I began to relax the seated requirement and relaxed into lying down meditation. Sometimes (often on days when I’ve woken up super early or am having trouble motivating myself to get out of bed), I start my day with a meditation in bed. 

So, I am not averse to adjusting my meditation habits over time. And, I’ve never made the adjustment unconsciously. And, I’ve never included a moving meditation in my streak, at least not before May 7th. And, I do think it’s appropriate to count 5 Rhythms as a meditation, though I’d probably feel differently if it was the only form of daily meditation I practiced every day, which is how I feel about lying down meditation, too. Yes, at times the system of rules and regulations and definitions of what counts and what doesn’t inside my head verge on the Kafkaesque. For example, I don’t count riding around town on a bike as my workout, but I’ve also realized that it is a factor that needs to inform the workout I choose to do on a day when I’ll be riding around town a lot.

Which brings me back to my immediate problem on May 8th—what should I do about the meditation streak?

First, I decided to meditate, with the intention to notice what was coming up around the issue. Then, I thought, why bother? You’re just fooling yourself. You’re back to zero. You won’t get back into the 1600s on a new streak until you’re into your sixties. Suck it up. I sat down to meditate anyway. I considered whether there was a freedom in not being on the streak anymore. I’ve got a number of new, unasked for and unwanted, freedoms in my life. I don’t want more of these types of freedoms.

These thoughts crowded my mind: I have deep expertise in the field of being hard on myself, maybe this was not the moment? But if I follow that logic, was I at risk of being too gentle? What long time discipline would I cheat on next? If I decided to count 5 Rhythms, was I lying to myself? What would I lie to myself about next? A rabbit hole of dire possibilities yawned open.

Then, as if switch flipped, my mind quieted and I heard, count it. Add the session into your log. The streak motivates you If after a few days, you feel like a lying, cheating fraud, you can always take it out.

Well, it’s been more than a week now. When I look at my streak count, which is, as I type this (on Friday May 19, is 1628, I feel no remorse. I’ve come clean here about my streak. That’s enough. No public hanging required. I will continue on with my streak.

That last sentence was supposed to be the end of this post. My intention was to let the writing sit over the weekend and come back to polish the next week.

…

Except.

…

Saturday morning. May 20th 2023. I finish my run and decide to meditate outdoors. It’s only then that I realize, holy fucking shit, I did not meditate on Friday. The very day I was writing my first draft of this post, I forgot to meditate. Again. And this time, there was no 5 Rhythms waiting in the wings to save me. I was stunned. Was this the universe punishing me because I was lying to myself about my meditation streak with my 5 Rhythms fiddle? I sat down to meditate on my new streak-less reality. As I listened to the wind in the trees and breathed the breeze, waves of grief, followed by waves of jubilation rocked through my body. Each wave swelling into the space of the receding wave, as grief rolled into jubilation rolled into grief. For everything that’s been happening. When I finished my meditation, I was shaken. And I accepted. No, more than that, I welcomed what was. That was my word of the year, here was a reminder of the practice. I was not being punished or tested or whatever. I was living and doing the best I can. Later that day I bought a bottle of champagne to share with the friends I was having dinner with. To celebrate the ongoing deconstruction of my life.

This was the quote on my Insight Timer app on the day I realized that I’d forgotten to meditate. It felt like a message addressed to me rather directly. And the other image is my welcome to what now is.

I’m on day 4 of my new streak today. Or so Insight Timer tells me. And I don’t intend to streak for the time being. I will take the days as they come. 

When Grief Is Your Running Companion
death · running · self care

When Grief Is Your Running Companion

Mina5 Comments

In Joy Hargo’s poetry collection,  Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings, there is a poem titled, We Were There When Jazz Was Invented, interspersed with lines of italicized words I didn’t recognize. Wey yo hey, wey yo hey yah /hey.I like to read poetry aloud and, as I read her poem, a series of strong emotions swept through me — sadness, longing, love. I am often overtaken by the emotion of a poem while I’m reading, but, in this case, I didn’t even know if I was reading proper words. I later learned that they weren’t words. They are what’s called vocables (more on that in a moment). Yet, I could feel their meaning as I spoke the sounds aloud. They compelled a chant that seemed to start in my very DNA. I read that poem in summer 2019.

The feeling of that poetic chant came back to me suddenly last Tuesday morning when I was running. My beloved 17.5- year-old cat had died in my arms 3 days before.

My beloved Emily in March & April, and when she was a wee kitten.

The loss arrived less than six months after the loss of my mother and my relationship of almost 29 years. I felt (feel!) like I have been thrown into a bottomless abyss. The nausea of falling and falling and falling; of fear & grief and fear & grief and fear & grief. Of ear-ringing silence. And yes, I had gotten myself out to move my body, if only for a reprieve from the desire to crawl out of my own skin. As I was running, I started to cry. The tears were not enough. I started to moan quietly as I ran. Then I found myself vocalizing sounds, as in Joy Harjo’s poem. Of course, I couldn’t remember what her exact not-words had been, nor did I remember that they were called vocables. I just remembered the feeling of the chant.

As I ran, I let sounds arrive on my out-breath, until I settled into a pattern of Hee Ya, every second out breath. I varied the pitch, tone and emphasis as I chanted. I varied the volume according to how close other people were, getting louder when I was less likely to be heard. Still, I saw some heads turn as I ran by. I didn’t care if people thought I was crazy. Maintaining the chant was a challenge. I had to control my breath more consciously than I usually do when I’m running. More like swimming. At times, I felt like I wasn’t getting quite enough air. I continued. I had the sensation that my nervous system was shifting into a different gear. Slower. Deeper. Even as my running pace picked up. Breathe in. Chant out. Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in. Chant out. For the last three miles of my run. Over and over and over. Here’s what that sounded like.

I was not containing my grief. I was opening a channel to allow the grief energy to flow. When I finished my run, I was rinsed. The desolation was not gone, but it wasn’t stuck inside me either.

And I wanted to share the practice with you. In case any of you are going through a challenging time. I remembered that I’d written about reading Joy Harjo’s poem. I rummaged around on the internet until I found that piece. I had completely forgotten that later, on the very same day I first read the poem, I was reading Ursula K LeGuin’s book, Always Coming Home, when I came across a footnote that read (the italicized paragraphs that follow are directly from my 2019 piece): “This is LeGuin’s tribute to Native American tradition, in which the syllables “he-ya” are common vocables, or wordless syllables. As American folklorist Barre Toelken comments on a Navajo song that is all vocables, ‘it has no words, but is all meaning. (The Anguish of Snails: Native American Folklore in the West, 2003).’”

At the time, I was astounded by the not-coincidence of this explanation landing in my field, on the very same day. Today I am amazed to see that the very vocables I landed on, for no conscious reason, are common vocables.

Understanding! The words in the poem were vocables. Now I had a word to describe their wordlessness. The footnote went some way to explaining why I had responded with such feeling to Joy Harjo’s poem. I felt, too, how grabbing at the word for my experience satisfied me intellectually, but left me wanting to understand at a more visceral level.

The next morning, I listened to a meditation guided by Thich Nhat Hanh. Our breath, he said, is how we access the oneness of our body and mind. Aha. Three points of contact with an idea and a glimmer of gut-level connection clicked into place.

Song is like breath. If there are no words, only wordless syllables, then our bodies and minds can receive the song, as breath, without judgment, without trying to figure out meaning. We can’t think our way to the answer. We have to feel. Chanted vocables enable us to access the oneness of body and mind.

As I ran, the chant was opening access to my body-mind, to my wholeness. No compartments. Clearing a channel for the fullness of my emotions.

I intend to explore the practice on my next runs. I’ve noticed with embodied practices, like this, that once I have a better intellectual grasp, I’m often able to deepen the impact. As if having agency (which I define as intention + choice) enriches an experience. We shall see.

And if you decide to test drive the practice, let me know how it goes.

Sweating Like a Whore
femalestrength · feminism · gender policing · sexism

Sweating Like a Whore

Mina1 Comment

I once called my mother a whore. We were playing double solitaire. A game that, between the two of us at, was a full contact sport. Slapping our cards down with no mind as to whether the other person’s hand might be in the way. In this particular game, we were neck-a-neck, cards piling up in the center at the speed of light, then we were both going to the same stack with the same card and my mum’s hand was quicksilver, hitting the mark before me. You whore. I shouted loud enough for the house to hear. She laughed with gleeful satisfaction. I wasn’t even grounded. That’s how complicit we were in our intensity. Even calling her a whore was allowed. I don’t know why, but that was one of the insults au-courant between my best friend and I. We felt very dangerous and risqué when we used the word.

Now, I hate the word. I hate all its implications. Of women demeaned. Of the judgment reserved for women and never their client-suitors. So, when a Soul Cycle instructor used the word the other day in class, my whole body snapped to angry attention. Here’s the context. Into the third song of the 45-minute workout he asked, Are you all sweating like a whore in church? ‘Cause if you’re not, you should be working harder.

First, it took me a minute to figure out what the expression even meant. The word whore had sidelined my reasoning capacity. Then, as my mind picked back through the expression, it dawned on me. Oh. She’s sweating, because her work is deemed a sin according to the doctrine of the religious institution, whose pews she’s seated in. Sweating because she has too much to repent. Judgment Day is coming for her. Sweating because she’s a woman who leverages her sexuality. Sweating because the lord on high will be displeased by her presence. Maybe he will smite her.  

Why (oh why) would someone use that expression in a room full of strong, modern women? A young gay man, no less. He could have substituted himself into the expression, the implications are the same. And he would, at least, have been making a joke on himself (still not a nice joke, though humor is more excusable when we make ourselves the butt of the humor). Instead, he regurgitated what was, no doubt, an expression he heard in his childhood. Perpetuating values infused with religiosity and thus with patriarchal misogyny. I’m going to hazard a guess that the largest proportion of the women spinning that day did not look to the church as their arbiter of moral values. I doubt that even the instructor looks to the church as his moral beacon. Yet, there he was quipping in support of organized religion’s apparent mandate to control women and their bodies.

Sweating bottles (I chose this image because it is beautiful, IMHO, and I wasn’t keen on putting an image of a sweating whore), by Greg Rosenke on Unsplash

I contemplated speaking to him afterward. Trying to make light, yet still make clear what I’d found disturbing. I reasoned that he probably was not even aware of what he was saying, even that he might appreciate me pointing out the dissonance. Then I worried that he’d dismiss me as a cranky older woman. Then I worried that I was a cranky older woman, too easily triggered because my current life circumstance is high stress. And the result is that I have zero tolerance for any demeaning treatment of women.

What did I do? Nothing.

Except canvas various of my friends about their responses. Everyone, except me, had heard the expression before. While they all agreed it was offensive, when considered closely, they were split on whether I should have said something or not. Some agreed with my do nothing approach and others thought it was important to call such things out.

And, in case you think that calling women whores is a relic of church jokes, this happened to me and a woman friend the other day. We were out for a brisk morning walk together in a mixed-use bike-walk lane. Or so we thought. Until a cyclist zipping by said, Slut!

At first, as with the whore joke, we were both perplexed. We verified with each other that we’d heard correctly. Never mind that I was confused by the singular, when there were two of us. Was only one of us a slut? If so, which one? We deduced the angry cyclist thought we were infringing on the bike lane, after studying the available lanes more closely and noticing there was indeed a walking lane further over. I wonder if the insult applies only to women walking in bike lanes, or if it’s any woman doing an activity in an unsanctioned location. Push ups on a tennis court. Cycling in a walking lane. Is any unsanctioned activity by definition slutty? Does slut retain any sexual connotation? Or is the unsanctioned activity viewed as an indicator of loose morals? A gateway to turpitude.

What I’m sure of is that the cyclist wasn’t having a good morning.

There’s no true equivalence for whore and slut to describe a man. They are words with ugly intent. Normally I like to reclaim words and expressions and transmute them into a feminine power expression. I haven’t figured out how to do that yet with these words.

Any ideas? 

My Fit Feminism Is a Fraud
fitness

My Fit Feminism Is a Fraud

Mina15 Comments

My “brand” is Run Like a Girl. I’ve written two books about the transformational impact of sports in women’s lives. How physical strength transmutes into empowerment for us elsewhere. And I write for this blog, at which feminism is baked into the very name. Before becoming a writer, I worked as a lawyer and human rights advocate for several years, even doing a Master’s of Law at Ivy League school. I transmuted my own life when I started running and accessing my potential in new ways. The extremely short version is that I left the practice of law. I started to focus on my passion, which was writing. I climbed back down the ladder and took entry level editorial work. I started to climb back up the ladder in publishing. Then, I moved to an educational start up as head of content, which soon head south organizationally and financially.

I liberated myself from my day job and took advantage of the financial freedom offered by my marriage. I worked freelance as a ghost writer and editor, without the daily fear of absolutely needing to make money. Instead, I worked on my own writing projects and followed my curiosity and desire to find work that felt creatively and artistically fulfilling and also of service. I trained in theatre, in Non-Violent Communication and Internal Family Systems, based on which I lead workshops, facilitate learning groups and offer writing, creativity and compassionate communication coaching.

In other words, I have a decent suite of skills.

I should be successful.

By which I mean—financially independent.

I am not.   

Time after time, I made decisions to prioritize the flexibility and freedom that benefitted me and my relationship. We (the team that my relationship was) didn’t need more money. I had the luxury of following my heart. My partner loved his work. He wasn’t resentful that I didn’t contribute my share financially. My contribution was …

This is where things get tricky. Me. Card carrying feminist with the author credits to prove it. What was my contribution to my relationship, if it wasn’t financial?

I paid the bills, even if I didn’t make the money to pay them. I managed a lot to do with the household and our social life. How gendered. I know. It gets worse. There was this: I offered my energy, my creative engagement with the world. I brought home what I was immersed in. A magpie decorating her nest. Would you like to hear the Baudelaire poem I worked on in theatre class? I’d translate it on the fly for my partner, to his delight. How about this demo of the Internal Family Systems technique that I watched today? Or would you come to a rehearsal of my new play and give me some feedback? And then I’d run an ultra-marathon on the side and feel strong and accomplished in the breadth of my life.

I told myself that I wasn’t a ‘50s housewife, setting my hair in curlers once a week and making sure I had on fresh lipstick and dinner in the oven when my man came home from work. But, was I really that much different? That woman offered her energy and engagement to nurturing and maintenance of the relationship. And when the relationship failed. She was lost.

After 29 years, my relationship has failed. I am not financially independent. I am in trouble.

At one point in my life, when I was working as an editor on finance books. I had an author who wrote about the importance of a woman being financially independent. I was a great editor—emotionally supportive, while constructively challenging her ideas and structure, to create more clarity and impact with her message. And I did not take the message in for myself.   

What was I thinking? That I would be safe and secure forever inside my marriage?

I did not even have a credit card in my name. I was the wife on my husband’s cards. Result? The only credit card that I am currently eligible for is cash secured. In other words, a debit card dressed up in a credit card costume. Which I was rejected for when I applied online. It wasn’t until I called customer service to point out that it didn’t make any sense to reject me for a cash secured card that I actually got approved. Having the sense of privilege to even make that phone call is a barrier to entry that made me wonder how many people are turned down and do not feel entitled to call the bank to follow-up. Ending up with a cash secured card with worse terms of use than mine and no possibility of being converted to a real credit card.

The feminist part of me is in a rage against the part who thought she’d be safe and secure. The tension between these two parts of myself, which has simmered for years beneath the surface has burst, spraying all the pus and blood of my misalignment. Bring back the stocks. Lock her up in the public square and allow real feminists to throw rotten tomatoes at her (and not even heirloom tomatoes). Tattoo my shame on my forehead: Bad Feminist! At least the feminist part doesn’t want to stone me to death. That would be against her politics.

Graffiti poster on multi-color wall repeating Feminists Resist by Claudio Schwarz on unsplash

These days, I feel like I’m held together by strings and tape (not even good duct tape, just flimsy scotch tape). I wake up in the morning and have to remind myself to breathe. When I exercise, which I still do, albeit very slowly and delicately, I need to take breaks for dizziness. And over and over and over again, I ask myself, why did I allow this to happen? Who is this woman I’ve become? 

I’m terrified, too, that exposing this truth about my fraudulent feminism will cost me friends and work, neither of which I can afford to lose right now. Yet, I can’t live anymore with the dissonance in my system. I don’t know what the future will be. Except I know it will be more feminist-aligned.

A friend sent me this Rumi quote: As you start to walk on the way, the way appears.

I sure fucking hope so.