Training the puppy

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I tossed and turned for hours last night….my body couldn’t seem to stay still.  I couldn’t quite get to sleep and my mind was turning over the same series of thoughts.  My brain was trying to map out my schedule for today which was to be quite busy with errands and appointments.  But silly busy mind that it is just couldn’t stop the chatter, even when I had been over my schedule tens of times.  My mind wanted to keep processing the information, in all sorts of different tables: by time, by place, by type of errand.  I wished I could knock myself out, but I’m no good at self-inflicting pain.

So my body attempted to keep up with my head and I couldn’t lay there anymore.  I got up, fumbling around in the dark, trying to keep my eyes to half slits lest I fully wake up and never return to sleep.  I ate some walnuts, hoping that filling my belly would make me more tired (sometimes it works).  It was a futile effort though because it wasn’t my body that needed a tranquilizer – it was my mind.

And that’s when I remembered meditation.  I couldn’t remember the last time I had done that.  Two years ago, I began to teach myself how to meditate.  I used to take walks in nature because that was the easiest way to try to calm my mind.  Eventually, I was able to work on doing it in my living room, using a candle as a focus point.  I was never particularly proficient at it, not in the way that great yogis spend hours in their transcendent meditations.  I was lucky if I could eck a few minutes out, but that was often enough.  It calmed me just enough to let go of all the thinking, that awful mind chatter that can nearly drive me to labotomizing thoughts.

I returned to bed, sitting cross-legged, belly fully of walnuts, and I rested my hands on my thighs while I breathed in deeply and evenly.  Every time a thought crossed my mind (“yoga at 8:15,” “don’t forget to go to Book People,” “leave enough time to duck into Lululemon in all its overpriced outrageousness”), I gently told my mind to let it go.  Attempting to create a blank slate of the mind is an uphill battle.  The thoughts trickle in at first while you try to let them go in a zen-like way.  If things are not going well, they will start to run in more quickly, threatening to damp your meditation fire high.  I’ve had some great, calming experiences meditating and I’ve had some like last night – tortuously difficult.

One of my yoga teachers once remarked that the mind is like a puppy.  When you’re trying to train it to listen, to still, to focus, it is going to be rambunctious – it’s not the puppy’s fault – it comes with the age.  So what do you do when the puppy is being hyper?  Do you beat the puppy?  In most cases, no, thank goodness.  You gently lead the puppy back to where you want it to be, and when it runs away again as it inevitably will, you lead it back.

My mind was a very bad puppy last night, but still I attempted the training.  And amazingly enough, it began to work.  Slowly, but surely, my mind started to calm.  I assured my brain that it didn’t matter if I charted the next day out exactly.  Things would happen as they needed to, and it would somehow get done.  Going over and over and over it was not serving anyone, especially my increasingly sleep-deprived self.  This logic, combined with the focus on stilling the mind worked.  I fell asleep fairly quickly, and, though I could have used some more rest than I got overall, I was spared a completely sleepless night.

I needed all the energy I could get for today.  It was a beautiful day, full of so many things I love about Austin – a yoga class, a yummy breakfast at a local place – Bouldin Creek, a visit to Book People, a complimentary facial at the salon, a new outfit at Anthropologie, and a drive down to Zilker.  Tonight’s visit with friends to the Belmont for the Daily Juice’s famous Thursday night cocktails will round out the evening perfectly.

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