Mind Set Go

I emailed and texted two people today who are having a particularly hard time with life. 

(I’ll add commentary afterwords that describes some of the content of the following email I sent.) 

Here is some of what I wrote to one person:

“My recommendation is to do the Chill Drills routinely… to think of them as something you love… and are doing for yourself. It’s a way to allow your mind to go somewhere else. Even for that little while, it makes a huge difference for yourself.

You can think of taking care of yourself as more than self-preservation.  You deserve to be in the best health possible for you today.  When we ache or hurt, however, we feel like not moving.  Finding that sweet spot between moving enough, in ways that will maintain and /or improve things, versus resting and healing, is tricky.  Certainly we should have time to rest, to allow things to heal. In those times we have to remind ourselves that when we are doing nothing, we’re doing something.

The thing is, people assume they are doing everything right when things are going smoothly.  And some people think they must be doing things wrong when things happen.  But that’s just it: things happen. Those things are not necessarily anyone’s fault, including your own.

Hang in there, friend. Moving mountains starts with one little stone at a time (borrowed from Confucius) but not all mountains have to be moved. Accepting that there’s a mountain but that mountains can be viewed in new ways means it may not be all that you see and feel.  It may all look and feel quite differently tomorrow, too.

You are doing so many things right. Focus on that. You are moving and meditating not to necessarily be something you used to be, but maybe to enhance who you are right now. That’s truly awesome. You do matter. Your feelings matter; your ideas matter. You can make a difference in other people’s days. I know you did mine.  Perhaps not great English, but you get my drift.

Try smiling. It will make you feel really good. No matter what’s going on. Meditation will help you see the world with new eyes and ears, and to focus on one thing at a time. And all that occurs by doing something that is what some would call nothing.

Now you have to smile about that!”

Chill Drills are meditations presented on a Military OneSource app.  It’s a free download, and I swear by them.  I used them regularly for quite a while and still do go back to them frequently.  The title seems to indicate that they are for stress.  It’s no doubt that meditations calm stress, but I honestly don’t use them for that.  I use them to get into the zone.  If you are a beginner or a seasoned meditator, these are for you.  You can quickly change your mindset.  Whether you use them to control stress or not, you will feel less stressed in what seems like inexplainable ways.  It just happens.

When I was recovering from an actual 22-hour reconstruction surgery, one where they woke me up hourly for days after the surgery (to check blood flow) I didn’t want to bother anyone, to ask them to get the little Playaway box that had these same Chill Drills from out of my carry-on stowed away from me in ICU.  But I had used these meditations so much that I didn’t need to follow along with Heidi Bauer’s soothing voice on the recording. 

I especially like/d the progressive muscle relaxation meditation.  Although I had stitches from one hip to the other, I was able to tense and relax face, arms, legs, buttocks.  And I am serious, the staff literally came in every single hour for days.  Imagine being awakened 70 times in 70 hours and after that getting awakened every 2 hours for days.  Now imagine someone having that experience and being in a really good, grateful mood throughout.  They wondered what I was up to.  Why was I so happy?  Why didn’t I need any pain medication other than some Tylenol?  Why was I healing so quickly?

It was no secret.  It was meditation.  I was literally in surgery 22 hours.  It took me a long time to wake up and when I did, I was sitting with my face up with a ventilator shoved down my throat like a big alien.  I tried to speak, to let someone, anyone, know that I was awake, but only air came out of my body in a way I really can’t describe here.  It wasn’t pretty, but I realized something almost immediately:  I was alive.  I had survived that long, grueling surgery that was only supposed? to be like 14 or 15 hours.  It had taken longer, I was later told, because my veins were small.  Yet here I was alive, and I was truly grateful to be alive.  I never want to forget that feeling.

They had moved an artery, cutting pieces out of my cartilage on both sides of my chest and “harvested” tissue and vessels, meaning fat and veins and the artery or maybe arteries.  I know it’s way too much information, but let’s just say, this was no easy, simple surgery, and I believe because there weren’t large teams of people and because my veins are small, it took a long while to do this surgery, much of it microsurgery. 

I have no implants.  I’m all original, but it did not come without quite an ordeal.  But a turning point in my life (and I’ve had several) was the moment I realized, ventilator and all, that I had made it.  That I was still alive, and I was grateful to be here!

Later that week, the medical world, also couldn’t figure out how I had walked so well after lying in bed for days.  You see, when I was ready to start moving the day previous to when I actually did start walking, a motorcycle victim had been rushed into the hospital and was in the room next door.  I knew, because the staff had come into my room to grab equipment and someone told me what had happened.  “Please,” I told them, “don’t worry about me.”  When I should have started moving, I wasn’t, but I was still in bed all that time doing progressive muscle tension and relaxation, and the next day, a day the other guy never got to see, I walked.  And they wondered why or how…  after what I had been through, moving so little.  It was meditation.

At a previous surgery, the precursor to that reconstruction surgery, I was asked whether I’d like to be given medication to take the “edge off” prior to going to the operating room.  What edge?  I was feeling pretty good about the upcoming proposed 6-hour surgery.  I was, afterall, meditating.  And so, no… I didn’t have them give me something to calm me down.  I was then wheeled into the OR with no sedation.  Of course, I was sedated for the surgery, but this is why I mention it at all: that moment, being rolled in a bed down the hall to surgery, I could hear my heartrate beating on the machine beside me, a heartbeat that many wouldn’t be able to control given the same circumstances.  But I could.  While I was rolling in the hallway, I took a few diaphragmatic breaths and I heard the heartrate lower.  My blood pressure was normal.  And when the doors opened into that bright white sterile room filled with a team of people, I was calm yet excited to proceed.  And I realized something else in those moments in the hall.

What I realized was that I often function as if I somehow control my destiny.  I mean, we all ask questions and base our own decisions on what we deem safe and reasonable for ourselves.  But just before that door opened, in that hallway, I realized that, for once, I had to trust.  I knew nothing about surgery even if I came from generations of surgeons.  I didn’t know exactly what they were going to do or how they would do it.  I didn’t know what the outcome would be.  What my body would do.  I had to hope that the people I very well could have drilled and judged in some layman’s way during office visits days, weeks and months previously, knew what they were doing and were having a good day.  I just had to trust.

It’s meditation that helped me let go.  But these examples aren’t the greatest example I have.

I had an opportunity to jump out of a plane several years before this, and yes, I had Chill Drills even back then.  There are only a handful of meditations included, but I love them.  I had been listening to Chill Drills and I was “sitting” at other times, just releasing my thoughts and being still.  I had had no instruction.  I just tried to sit and let my mind rest.  Anyway, there was a group of us jumping, but I was separated from them and was on a plane, instead, with a famous jump team. 

The plane circled, spiraling up to 14,000 feet, (the ground was at around 5,000 feet elevation) and the door opened and the first half of these seasoned men bumped fists and one after the other, swooshed out of the plane.  We spiraled back up, and the same thing ensued.  Now it was my turn.  Having lost altitude during the jumps, we again spiraled back up to 14,000’.  I wasn’t alone, mind you; I was tandem, attached, like a turtle, to a man.  We pulled our oxygen out of our noses and shimmied to the door.  It opened, and I was ready!  Excited and not scared. 

Then I was pulled back and the door shut in front of me.  It was too windy.  Were they kidding?  They said, the conditions had changed.  It was too windy.  And after days of wondering why I had sad yes to this opportunity, awaking at night only to realize after meditating that I truly wanted this, I was going to do it, and I was excited.  I meditated at times like that.  Now that opportunity was gone.  We started to descend, and they told me, “Maybe later,” but I knew the airfield was being closed that day for other reasons.  I started to get a bit emotional.  Are you kidding me?  Although I had other opportunities to fly or go gliding that day, I had only signed up for this, because I wanted so badly to do it.  Now, like I said, I had no hope of going that day at all.  I retreated into my room to lick my mental wounds when I had another revelation:

It wasn’t about jumping.  It was about the moment that door opened and I wasn’t afraid.  It was about seeing a team of people and feeling their energy, people very few get to go up with.  And just then the phone rang.  Would I like to go tomorrow?

Yes.  But would I wake up in the night, second guessing my decision again?  I think I did, but it was another opportunity to meditate. 

The next morning I was with a different guy, but the drill was the same.  I was decked out, spiraled up to 14,000, took off the oxygen, shimmied to the door, and when it opened, I had that same exhilarating feeling.  Only on this jump I had actually jumped, freely, with no second thought.  No fear.

Just like when I was rolled into surgery several years later, I can tell you that there is no making up a lack of fear when faced with certain circumstances.  We don’t know how we will react when something happens, but we know what we can do beforehand.  If your motive is to achieve certain things through meditation, I honestly don’t know if you’ll get there.  But if your motive is to try your best at letting go of where the mind takes you, with your logical explanation for life that you create in your own head—if your motive is to simply let that go… you can soar to places you never thought possible.  You will see colors and beauty as you maybe haven’t experienced since you were a baby.  You will stop getting so bent out of shape behind a wheel of a car, and you will look at people as the 100 percent equals they are. 

Now this is not to say that I don’t have my own issues.  Sometimes overthink what people say… Like how someone just this week told me in all seriousness something so far from the truth… that my husband probably wishes he had not wasted one year of his life caring for me.  Really?  But what that person really was saying was about her, that she worries about that feeling in herself.  It wasn’t a reflection of me and my worth or my husband’s noble character.  (He did everything for me [when I was so, so sick and weak and I couldn’t stand up without my heart racing to 165 with the meds I was on and the atrophy I had afterwards,] with unconditional love. And joy.)  Other times I do stand up for what I think is wrong, whether toward me or toward other people.  Fighting back isn’t a habit during times like that, but a reaction to right wrongs.  Worrying about what other people think or say or what you say or do is something you and I can work on, i.e., let go, through meditation.

Life is very, very good.  Like I said, “Things happen.”  I’m not the only one who thinks this way.  My good friend Billy Arnold has put those very words, his own words, in his two books: So You Want to be a Musician and Keeping the Groove after 70+.  He embodies integrity and offers powerful words through very simple messages.

Go ahead: download the free Chill Drill app.  If you want to know more about your brain and to find more meditations, buy the audio book: Meditations toChange Your Brain: Rewire your neural pathways to transform your life by Rick Hanson, PhD & Richard Mendius, MD.  Another great book is Meditation: An in-depth guide by Ian Gawler and Paul Bedson. 

There’s no better way to start than to start.  Sit quietly without doing anything.  Just let your head rest.  Download the Chill Drill app from Military One-Source.  And if you want more, to know why it works and how to do it, invest in the other books.  As Hanson and Mendius point out, you can rewire your brain. 

We’re all changing.  Why not do things that are simple and free—that can help you jump into life freely, literally or figuratively, without reservation? Do it for who and what you are, though, not simply for what you hope to become. You’re worth it, and you do matter.