Week Fourteen - Mindfullness......

I gave my counselor the blogsite address before my last appointment.  She noticed the comment I made earlier about not wanting to be "mindfull" because my mind was too full already!  While she understood the tongue-in-cheek spirit in which that was said, she also had some good advice for me regarding mindfullness as a stress management tool.

To understand why this sort of advice is important, you may need to know a bit more about me. 

As a child, I was a bookish, shy person.  I was very content with my own company - after all, I didn't make fun of myself the way others often did!  I redesigned board games to fit my rainy-day fantasies.  I played outdoors, riding "horseback" on the "back forty" for hours on end.  When my mom became concerned that I was spending too much time reading in my room, she'd kick me out of the house.  My younger brother recently shared that one of his favorite memories of me was of a time when I took books with me and climbed a tree with him.  We sat high in the branches, tree swaying, reading together.  In essence, I lived in my own imagination or in books almost all of the time.

Even as an adult, I often felt out of place. I learned to blend, learned to be friendly and to at least appear a little outgoing. But in all honesty, the first time I felt like a normal person was when I hit medical school - that place was FULL of bookish, shy, intense people!  (Not at all what you'd imagine doctors to start out as LOL.) Now, no one who knows me would select the word "shy" to describe me, but I'd rather go the dentist than to walk into a room full of strangers.

So my mind IS full.  But it's full of vivid imagination, memories of great books, medical articles.  It's cluttered with to-do lists, It's loaded with calendar dates,  memories of the love of family over big tables full of food with 20 people around, and the promise of beach week. 

And fear.  And worry.  And grief for my baby.

Vivid imagination is all very well in it's own way, but I have seen too much and can imagine too well what lies ahead for her in the coming weeks and months. I can imagine funerals. What I cannot fully imagine is whether or not I can live without her.

And here is where I need to be "mindfull".  I need to be able to focus on something outside of the fear.  I cannot live in an ocean of worry waiting for the next wave to swamp me.  So she is teaching me how to empty my mind a bit, and focus on one thing at a time. 

Basically mindfullness is just the serenity prayer.  Especially the part about "the wisdom to know the difference."

DeeDee