Mind Set Go

In a Boy Scout life guard course I took two and a half decades ago, I learned that when saving someone who is drowning, one needs to do the opposite of what seems natural. You see, when someone is drowning, they have the potential to hold on and drag the lifeguard under in an attempt to save themselves.  They can, essentially, drown the very person attempting to save them. 

What I learned was this: if someone is holding on to you for dear life, dragging you under, threatening to drown you in their primal attempt to stay alive and hold their own head above water, the thing to do is to dive down instead of doing what every cell in your body says to do, to hold your own head (and them) above water.  If you dive down, that person will simply let go.  At that point the life guard is able to reapproach and save the victim rather an becoming a victim, themselves.  Perhaps you have already assumed that this discourse is about the person doing the diving.  What I would like to discuss first, however, is our own attempts to hold on like the original drowning person. 

Try as we might, we do not let go.  We hold on to possessions, attitudes, judgements, beliefs.  We are, essentially, drowning in our own attempts to stay alive.  We cannot relax to enable others to help us.  We are starved for air and for anything else we believe, deep in our hearts, will keep us alive.  To understand what we do, we first have to accept that we are, maybe, a victim who is, in a sense, drowning in what might be classified as natural human instinctual behavior.

Are you drowning?  Figuratively speaking, of course.  Does this sound faintly familiar?

But are you also the lifeguard?  Are you rushing in to save someone else, risking your own health, safety and well-being?  If so, are you equipped with your own lifesaving techniques?

We could list countless things and practices we might include in what would be an arsenal of lifesaving tools—whether in the role of drowning person or savior.  Healthy food choices could be among the tools and practices that a drowning victim might have. Their arsenal might include clean, oxygenated air.  Sunshine.  A serene setting.  Medicine, both natural and pharmaceutical.  Meditation.  Prayer.  Religion and/or some sense of belief.  Social interaction.  Time.  Time to think.  Time to act.  Exercise.  Friendship.  Swim lessons.  The list goes on.

And what about that savior, a poor choice of word, I admit.  I’m referring to the lifeguard, one who is armed with the role of helping and prolonging life.  What are their tools?  Healthy food?  Clean oxygenated air?  Sunshine?  You get my point.  That which is a healthy lifestyle for the victim is also a healthy lifestyle for the lifeguard.  Skills and training to act quickly, prepared with necessary tools and knowledge, not to mention experience, might also be added to the lifeguard’s arsenal of tools and practices, of course.

An arsenal of tools and practices to enhance life doesn’t usually include the concept of letting go.  At least, you really have to admit that that is not what first comes to mind.  When someone compiles New Year’s resolutions, one might include throwing things away to declutter.  But letting go of stuff is quite different than letting go of preconceived notions of what we might do when faced with our own demise.  You know, when the shit hits the fan, so to speak?  And, are we preparing for the right reasons?

What does the Mirriam Webster Thesaurus list as antonyms or “near antonyms” of victim?  The words may surprise you.  “Winner; victor; gainer; murderer; killer; assassin; injurer; harmer.   Those words do not categorize the antonym of an accident victim. 

It is a lot to think about.  If you are a victim, is it because there is a winner, a victor, a murderer, a killer, an assassin or someone else out there successfully injuring or harming you?  Or, could one, instead, be a victim because one is attempting to keep one’s head above water at any cost?  Could one, in fact, ever be guilty of being a drowning person capable of bringing someone else under when the real intent was “merely” an attempt to stay alive?   

The winning circumstance for the lifeguard is to save a life while also staying alive, not that anyone looks at it as a win. The victory is in the positive outcome of the circumstance.  Victors, in this sense, are involved with that sort of victory—not personal gain. 

(Okay, I have, no doubt, gone down one too many rabbit holes.  I’m probably losing you and any assemblance of a point I never knew I was attempting to make in the first place!)  Consider this: what doesn’t seem right is sometimes right. 

It doesn’t seem right that you’d have more if you let go and had less.  It doesn’t seem right that in order to save someone, to hold their heads above water, that you would go in the opposite direction than the initial intent and save yourself first.  It doesn’t seem right that a victim may, in fact, add to a state victimization after an initial assault in how they respond or don’t respond to an assault.  It doesn’t seem right that all the things we might list to take care of ourselves might, in fact, miss the mark of what we might need.  And, it doesn’t seem right that something simple, that we already possess the power to do, we might already have.  But then, no one ever suggested that our simple brains respond in any other way than primal ways with thought—or in the case of the power of meditation—the lack thereof.

Having a diagnosis of a disease, as I did, felt, for sometime, as something that made me a victim in a sense.  Many lifeguards or trail angels (aka medical personnel or friends, family and kind souls) willingly came to my rescue.  They were, in a sense, the antonym of victim. 

That time in treatment and recovery, and in my case, a pandemic, afforded me many hours to, yes, get sick and flail, but also to heal and to meditate. To thrive.  I was, in a sense, much more alive in those seconds, minutes, hours, days, months and years than I am, perhaps, now. 

I have more now, in many senses of the word, and I guess some might think that I lost some things along the way.  I don’t look at what I lost.  I look at what I have gained, but that doesn’t mean that I spend my time in meditation as much as I did then.  Some might say life gets in the way.  But, life is life.  We have choices.  As we get back to routines, life becomes that: routine.  I would assert that it doesn’t have to be a rut, however, and that we constantly have opportunities to readjust— to realign.

I recently made a conscious decision to change something in my life.  I changed my diet.  I’ve never been on a diet before, but I found that as decades rolled around both what I ate and the quantity of what I ate changed—impacted by the fact that my body had changed.  I’m not just talking about added pounds here.  I’m talking about my body’s ability to process food and fat.  My fat.  

If anyone would have told me that after years of really only gaining weight or plateauing, that I could lose the purported 7 pounds in a week that this elimination diet claimed, or that I could lose over twenty pounds in the course of a couple of months without feeling hungry while eating healthy foods, I would have scoffed at the idea.  By eliminating seven foods groups for three weeks, the ones that often cause intolerances, and then adding four of them back in the course of the four following weeks, the Virgin Diet, as prescribed by the nutritionist J.J. Virgin, actually worked for me.  I needed to find out what was causing the weight gain and weight retention.  And I did.  Not only did I find out, but I made a conscious decision to do something about it. 

It wasn’t only about what I needed to eat, but what I needed to avoid.  Just how many of us are willing to let go of something?  How many of us are willing to make the change or changes we need?  How many are willing to do what it takes to even figure out what we need to do?

Would we rather continue our course of running on treadmills for hours on end, figuratively and literally, to do what we believe is necessary, often punishing ourselves in the mean time for not only being what we are but also believing we don’t have the power necessary to do what we need to do.  In reality, it isn’t about mind over matter.  It’s about proceeding mindfully.  Perhaps it’s almost like submitting to taking a lifeguard course to learn how to proceed mindfully?

When I was first a mother, I suppose I believed in my heart that I was an excellent one.  My babies never had bottles.  I was always there to nurture them, to feed them, to keep them clean.  To love them.  When I was first a mother, my baby didn’t have ear infections like the “other” babies.  Post hoc reasoning, but I must have been doing something right, I may have thought at the time?  But with my firstborn, at first, we had 3 hours of sleep at night followed by a feeding and then like another 4 hours of rest.  I hoped it would get better.  But it didn’t.  Actually, the lack of an assemblance of a schedule got worse and worse.  It seemed there was nothing I could do. 

Finally after ten months, I, and my baby, still had not had a night’s rest.  In fact, my baby was getting up every two hours.  My husband’s job demanded that he be rested for his work the next day, and since I wasn’t expressing and part of my life’s work was to nurture and provide to those around me, it was me who had gone in and fed our stirring baby.  It meant a happy baby and a happy, rested husband.  Right?

Finally, I brought our baby in to the doctor, and with dark circles under my eyes, I said, “There’s something wrong with my baby.  My baby is getting up every two hours.”  I even suggested, “Maybe my baby has one of those ear infections other babies seem to get around here?” 

I’ll never forget it.  The doctor looked over my baby and then had this strange small smile on his face, and said, “There is nothing wrong with your baby.  There is something wrong with you.” 

Only a doctor could have told me what to do.  Or, in my case, not do.  You see, none of my friends could, even if some had attempted.  I would not have listened to my parents either.  But I listened to my baby’s doctor, and this is what he told me:

“You’re going to go home, and tonight, you are going to let your baby cry.”  You see, my baby didn’t really cry.  My baby was always happy, always nurtured.  Those feedings were very short in the middle of the night. My baby was well fed and did not need to nurse for short periods of time all night long.  I knew that.  But what could I do?  The physician said, “You are not going to go in there until after your baby falls asleep.”

And so I went home, and when my very tired spouse came home, I told him the plan.  “Tonight, after I feed the baby, I will put our ten-month old in the crib and see how long it takes for the baby to go to sleep.”  It took 2 hours and thirty-six minutes.  During that course of time I remember my spouse asking me why we were doing that, if all it would take for the incessant screaming to stop was for me to simply feed the baby until the baby’s sleep ensued?  It was probably the longest 2+ hours we have ever endured. 

When I went to check on our baby, I changed a very stinky diaper and felt terrible that that must have been the problem.  I would have bet you all the money in our bank account that what would happen next would not have happened: our baby slept through the night that night for the first time in ten months of life. 

The next night, our baby cried for 45 minutes and then slept through the night.  The third night, ten minutes of crying and a full-night’s sleep.  And, on the fourth night, I laid the baby in the crib, and there was no crying.  On its own, the baby simply went to sleep. 

I’m still dumbfounded by that.  I suppose it was behavior modification at its best.  It’s not always about positive reinforcement.  Sometimes it really is about what you don’t do.  What you take away.  Some counterintuitive things are what work. 

I’ve told that story to many parents.  They seem to listen to me because it’s not just what to do or not do, but a real life example of what actually worked.  It seems that people often believe that human nature and good intentions will prevail.  In my case, it took someone I trusted, an authority, to tell me what not to do.  That really was it.  It was a case where not doing something was really what I had to do.

If you’re saving someone and they are pulling you under, should you keep saving them in the same way you naturally would?  Often, we think we are saving ourselves by what we’re doing, and because we believe it is the right thing and the right way, we just keep on doing it, more and more.  And when the results aren’t what we desire, we often blame ourselves.  Because we are well-intentioned, we believe we need to keep doing what we are doing rather than stopping what we are doing.

Stop eating this one or two food groups and bingo, you lose weight.  Stop reinforcing bad behavior and bingo, that behavior goes away.  Go in the opposite direction than you think you need to and you can save yourself and then someone else? 

What is routine?  Is it mindless patterns of life that others impose on us or that we impose upon ourselves?  I’m not talking about necessary hours at work here.  I’m talking about what we focus on or don’t focus on while at work, at play or when we are attempting to rest.  (There really is no thing as attempting to rest.  Attempting to rest isn’t resting.)  Okay, if you’re still with me by now, you know this mishmash of ideas and thoughts needs to come to an end. 

In one audio book I own about meditation, a physician methodically analyzed what meditation is and how to do it.  He, as a scientific thinker, applied scientific methods to understand something that was, at least at first, completely foreign to him.  He even devised mnemonic tricks to remember his analysis categories.  He analyzed what one does when one meditates.  And me, having had some practice in academic courses along the way, started taking notes even though I certainly was not going to be tested on this person’s theories and organized structure of meditation.

And then I turned off the audio and stopped listening, and I meditated.  No one needed to analyze what I was doing.  It is certainly someone’s prerogative to catalog what one does during meditation and then that same person could set the scenario for how one could do it.  But I could choose to not miss the point of what meditation is.  There is no wrong way to meditate.  There is no test of information at the end.  There is no person alive that can make me feel as if I am doing it the wrong way or that it needs to be understood in scientific or literary terms in order to practice it… not that he was suggesting that. 

Don’t get me wrong.  I have several books that guide and teach how to meditate.  I love those books. One such book is co-authored by Ian Gawler, and it’s really excellent. That’s not what that other book was, however.

It doesn’t mean we cannot analyze and document and intend to understand even in statistical terms what meditation is.  I’m just trying to emphasize that we mustn’t miss the point, and it’s very easy for all of us to do so.  We get so wrapped up in doing physical things and by holding on to physical possessions, that we often miss the point.  We often believe that if we have good intent, that it will all make sense and be easy.  But sometimes, just sometimes, ease, positivity and health come more from what we don’t do than from what we do.  When what we aren’t doing becomes what we’re doing, we’re sometimes on the right track.  And it is that.  A track.  A trail.  A never-ending quest for peace and understanding.  And that peace and understanding, my dear friends, only comes from exactly that: peace and understanding. 

Be kinder to yourself.  Give yourself time to heal and understand.  Stop being so hard on yourself.  Simply commit to making change work.  Accept new ideas.  What you need is often right there for you to sense and embody, and many times it is simpler than you might believe.   Meditate with your whole being rather than thinking about it.  Sink into space in order to float.