A Day of Repose

This week I had a regular dental cleaning and check-up. I scheduled a facial the same day at an upscale spa using a gift card that I had been given as a thank you gift. So I spent a couple of hours reclining while other people did things to my face.

Being unable to move for a set period of time is an interesting proposition. There is a forced passivity that can be disconcerting, that can make me feel trapped. It is an extreme version of many moments that happen many days – waiting in line, sitting in traffic. It feels like time theft. What else could I be doing?

On the other hand, I get to do nothing. I have to do nothing. How do I “steal” this time back? What is possible in these periods of “nothingness”? Since I couldn’t exactly ignore what was happening when I was in the dental chair with my mouth wide open, I did a kind of body scan of my face, head, and neck. I noticed that, although I could dispassionately analyze the moments of discomfort when they came, I still responded physiologically—my hands clenched, I furrowed my brow, my shoulders hiked. I would breath and relax, but, like stray thoughts during meditation, the tension would return again and again. Yet, by focusing I became aware of how the act of tensing felt, how it radiated out to other parts of my body. Clenching my hands affected my toes. Tensing my shoulders sent ripples into my stomach and intestines. During the facial, a significantly more pleasant experience, I focused on the sensations I felt: the steam on my face, the cool wet cloth on my eyes, the warm table, my slightly cold feet, the smell of mint and eucalyptus, the nature sounds recording playing softly, the fingers of the aesthetician massaging my skin, and, oh yes, the pain of extractions.

In the end, two hours of doing nothing but concentrating on my physical body felt like a respite. I didn’t miss the cacophony of social media, the news, and the silent demands that fill my brain when I am moving through my day. (Replace that battery! Follow up with the speech therapist! Fill out those insurance forms! Call B! Call M! Read this article!)

Any moment can become a windfall.

Buying Myself Flowers

I am starting 2016 by joining Apartment Therapy’s January Cure, four weeks of assignments designed to clean, declutter, and enliven one’s home. I have done the January Cure for the past few years and I find it to be the perfect mindful householder activity for January. We have just passed the winter solstice; sunlight is in short supply and the weather can be cold and dreary. The sparkling energy of the holidays is dwindling as people and retailers take down their Christmas decorations and lights. School is back in session after a break, so my daughter’s days are blissfully (for her and me) structured again. The house is in chaos and in need of some love.

Apartment Therapy believes that if you love your home, it will love you back. Their approach can be summed up as living space mindfulness. In trying to explain the site’s approach, I think of the R.E.M. song that goes, “Stand in the place where you live….” Think of Apartment Therapy’s approach as a meditation, in which one learns to focus on and be fully present in one’s home instead of just using it, sleeping in it, passing through it, just as one might focus on the body, breath, and conscious being.

The January Cure is like coming back to your breath after your mind has wandered. Turn your attention to your home. Relieve it of stagnation. Work to allow fresh energy to flow through it. Be thankful for where you live.

Appropriately, the first assignment on January 1^st is to buy flowers. This assignment is an annual tradition for the Cure.  One is instructed to buy flowers weekly on Friday throughout the month. Always worrying about how I spend money, I think to myself, flowers? In my messy house? But the goal is this: Bring beauty into your home. More importantly, bring an attitude of beauty into your home. Make that attitude tangible in the form of flowers (or, as the post suggests, an alternative like fruit in a bowl or a plant). This activity is not so different than a behavioral therapy exercise.

So I buy flowers. I notice how especially delicate and ephemeral they seem given the cold weather. The symbolic gesture works. Looking at them, I think, mindfulness is a delicate and ephemeral thing for me, too. And beautiful.