Posted on by Jessica Dofflemyer · 2 Comments

Groundless

We’re getting tossed about. All is shifting.

Our house is surrounded in scaffolding, as rotted fascia is replaced with new walls.

Jeb turns 11 on Friday. Hormones pulse beneath the flesh of his broadening shoulders. We look at each other, nearly, eye-to-eye.

The car got a new radiator (that leak was not just in my head – see post details here). And we discovered the rear shocks were shot, as well.

“What happens if you don’t replace the rear shocks?” I ask the mechanic, as I tally up the estimate he’s quoting me.

“Well, then you’ll have a pretty bumpy ride.”

I’m all for smooth sailing these days, but lately, circumstance seems to be continually swirling our family in the flurry of a snow globe. It’s unsettling. Discomforting.

Yet, I can’t help but think if I just changed my mind about it all, I may find some beauty in the blizzard.

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Sometimes in the midst of the chaos, I reach for the wisdom of a master. One who has dedicated her life to staying with all places uneasy. Pema Chodron dives right in. Suggests that the greatest gifts can be found when everything gets tight and goes topsy-turvy.

“…We continually find ourselves in that squeeze. It’s a place where we look for alternatives to just being there. It’s an uncomfortable, embarrassing place, and it’s often the place where people like ourselves give up…

This place of the squeeze is the very point in our meditation and in our lives where we can really learn something. The point where we are not able to take it or leave it, where we are caught between a rock and a hard place, caught with both the upliftedness of our ideas and the rawness of what’s happening in front of our eyes—that is indeed a very fruitful place.

When we feel squeezed, there’s a tendency for mind to become small. We feel miserable, like a victim, like a pathetic, hopeless case. Yet believe it or not, at that moment of hassle or bewilderment or embarrassment, our minds could become bigger. Instead of taking what’s occurred as a statement of personal weakness or someone else’s power, instead of feeling we are stupid or someone else is unkind, we could drop all the complaints about ourselves and others. We could be there, feeling off guard, not knowing what to do, just hanging out there with the raw and tender energy of the moment. This is the place where we begin to learn the meaning behind the concepts and the words.

We’re so used to running from discomfort, and we’re so predictable. If we don’t like it, we strike out at someone or beat up on ourselves. We want to have security and certainty of some kind when actually we have no ground to stand on at all.

The next time there’s no ground to stand on, don’t consider it an obstacle. Consider it a remarkable stroke of luck. We have no ground to stand on, and at the same time it could soften us and inspire us. Finally, after all these years, we could truly grow up…

We are given changes all the time. We can either cling to security, or we can let ourselves feel exposed, as if we had just been born, as if we had just popped out into the brightness of life and were completely naked.

Maybe that sounds too uncomfortable or frightening, but on the other hand, it’s our chance to realize that this mundane world is all there is, and we could see it with new eyes and at long last wake up from our ancient sleep of preconceptions…

We need encouragement to experiment and try this kind of thing. It’s quite daring, and maybe we feel we aren’t up to it. But that’s the point. Right there in that inadequate, restless feeling is our wisdom mind. We can simply experiment. There’s absolutely nothing to lose. We could experiment with not getting tossed around by right and wrong and with learning to relax with groundlessness…”

~Pema Chodron from “Three Methods for Working with Chaos” courtesy of Lion’s Roar

Posted on by Jessica Dofflemyer · 7 Comments

Making Dreams Come True

My unconscious self must be trying to elevate me from the ground-down stasis of my current physical challenge. The challenge being this humbling pinched nerve in my hip (detailed in yesterday’s post).

Last night in my dreams, I was ready for lift-off. The fire was lit, and I was in the basket of a hot air balloon, on the verge of launching billowing, striped colors to the sky.

courtesy of Beverly and Pack
courtesy of Beverly and Pack

It’s always good to get fresh perspectives.

Like Jeb’s, who was the one to point out my dreams. Not last night’s, but the one I had 34 years ago, back in second grade.

He and I were looking through my little “School Days” scrapbook. The one made for holding keepsakes from kindergarten through graduation. Throughout my time in school, I faithfully completed every year, inserting report cards and special awards. I filled out each year’s form, writing in the spaces about friends, favorite sports, and hobbies.

In second grade, “Additional Information” contained a wish.

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Jeb turned the page to third grade.

“Hey, the next year you wrote: ‘I love…Gerardo?…I want to ride in a hot air balloon with him.’ Who’s Gerardo?”

“Ah,right. He was a boy in my class from Mexico, who didn’t speak much English. He was really quiet, but I liked him.”

“You wanted to ride in a hot air balloon for two years in a row, Mom.”

“And I haven’t yet.”

So to wake this morning with dreamtime memories of lift off, makes me think it’s time this little fantasy comes true.

No hot air balloons in Hawaii. But how about the Czech Republic?

Our family is slowly planning a summer trip back to the Bohemian’s homeland. A quick online search this morning reveals a company in Prague that offers hot air balloon rides, year-round. You can float above ancient castles, and see a bird’s eye view of the countryside and forests.

Maybe no Gerardo (though I hope he is well, wherever he may be). But a hot air balloon with my two other dreams-come-true: my son and my husband? Airborne in Europe? Well, that’s more than I could have imagined when I was seven.

2014-11-19_second grade

Sounds like a Must to me.

Posted on by Jessica Dofflemyer · 6 Comments

From Ow to Now

It started with a dull ache. A few days of pain, that then culminated to one day of a downward spiral into paralysis. My body ground down to a halt, the nerve endings of my back and hip pulsing with a discomfort that made any posture hurt. Standing, sitting, horizontal- no positioning would allow me to get around the ow.

Two weeks later, with multiple bodywork and acupuncture sessions employed, I’m beginning to emerge from the haze, climbing (slowly) out of the pile of pillows, ice packs, tennis balls, and icy heat lotion. I think I can now safely shelve the bottle of ibuprofen.

It’s unnerving to have a pinched nerve. In that one is in a state of nervous panic about when/how the pain will end, feeling utterly out of control. Simultaneously, this lack of power (punctuated with chronic sting), breaks one down to a point of surrender, not unlike when your big brother pinned you down and made you cry “Uncle.”

The pinched nerve scenario seemed to play out mostly at night. Something about prolonged periods of being in one position made sleep possible for only an hour or two at a time. With a little help from the healing arts, I got to a place where I was able to function pretty well during the day, though my left side is still completely numb from hip to knee.

It’s fortunate that I have been able to move about during the day, as pre-incident, when I was still fit-as-a-fiddle, I had signed up for two volunteer shifts at the school concession stand, selling snacks in conjunction with Jeb’s fifth grade play. The production was a five-day run, requiring daily commutes to cast calls, entailing drive times of an hour and half, round-trip.

Once on location, I’d stash the tennis ball (which had been wedged between my low back and the car seat for added acupressure relief), and enter the theater space to see many-a-parent bustling about backstage with costumes and make-up.

I did not limp through the door, I just moved more deliberately. But there was nothing to let on that my thigh was not only novocain-numb, but that the skin was tender to the touch, as though crisply sunburnt. There was work to be done and brownies to sell. No time for woes. So I simply sorted the red vines from the cupcakes and made sure my front-row seat was saved, my camera, picture-ready.

After the final curtain call, we were left with white frosting smears on the counter tops and stage props to be disassembled. I had to tell a parent that I shouldn’t do any heavy lifting, mentioning this ‘pinched nerve thing’. It was embarrassing to have to bow out.

“I’d never know you were hurt. You look great. You seem fine,” she said.

I may have been swept up in the bustle of exchanging dollar bills for chocolate chip cookies, and, of course, I was a proud mother snapping shots of Jeb on stage. But the truth was, I felt far from normal. I was a moving body in a soup of tenderness, completely out of balance, fragile and unnerved.

And no one knew.

How often do we see one another, completely ignorant of the discomfort or unease that is residing just below the skin of our fellow humans? It may be a literal, physical ache, or just as uncomfortable, something emotional. Yet, we pass each other, smile and orbit, unaware.

Injury is humbling. And as the feeling in my leg slowly returns, I’m left with compassion for anyone in chronic pain. Whether of the soul or of the body, it is so hard to be hurting.

We are all going through something. Working out the kinks. Often, these processes are going on beneath the surface of our vessels, unseen.

Let’s remember this common, human thread we share. We all feel. Sometimes it hurts.

We can be gentle with ourselves. With each other.

Be mindful, that there is often more than what we see.

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