Embody Mental Health

Posts Tagged ‘moving’

…Just as soon as you decide to try something new, you begin to see all of the things you liked about it to begin with. 

 

I remember when I moved away from Fort Collins, Colorado in 2003 everything was more beautiful every day I got closer to leaving.  The sky was an ever-increasing vibrant royal blue and the rockies jutted up out of the fields of golden grass higher than ever and with a regal importance.  I couldn’t imagine why I had ever wanted to leave it behind; but in the end I left nonetheless. 

 

As I say goodbye to New Jersey, one day at a time, I keep finding nuggets of beauty I had forgotten were there.  I notice the kindnesses I had ignored amid the sea of chaos, pollution-muddied skies, and aggressiveness.  I  smiled with appreciation the other evening when a lady held the door for me, grinning, and making eye contact without a semblance of haried roughness. 

 

In the last week or so it seems like the roads don’t seem quite as crowded or angry, the landscape has suddenly revealed pockets of grassy loveliness in places I had never noticed, and the 3 month rainy season that was our summer finally departed leaving sunny days and warmth in its stead. 

 

And–like the haircut I just had to change and then realize I love an hour before my salon appointment–I find myself ambivilent over leaving my homestate. 

 

But, like a haircut that can grow back, I know I can always return and there is a comfort in that–New Jersey’s constancy and predictability. 

 

Erich Fromm, the renound social psychologist, said this [of new adventures]:

Let your mind start ajourney thru a strange new world.  Leave all thoughts of the world you knew before.  Let your soul take you where you long to be…Close your eyes, let your spirit start to soar, and you’ll live as you’ve never lived before.

 

Every experience, every journey, every state of being, state of mind, and state of the nation has its own uniqueness.  To explore the new, to some extent, we have to let go of the old.  As I stand in limbo between two worlds I find myself torn.  Hanging on, nostalgically, to the last morsels of “old”, not yet ready to embrace “new”.  I am contemplating the necessary freefall, but I am not ready to let go of the cliff’s edge from which I dangle.

 

Fromm’s words above strike me as very meditative, very spiritual.  The more internal “work” that yoga asks of us is to be able to be in the moment, with our body, with our souls and just be; not ask questions or think about yesterday or tomorrow and just exist in the present.  That is what Fromm illustrates poetically above: just be where you are and live in that experience, letting go of whatever came before the now. 

 

This is an essential piece of meditative practice and the yogic mindset that I grapple with.  I have trouble letting go.  Whether it is worry about the future or dwelling on the past, I have trouble being present-centered.  I need to work towards a “present-centered life” and letting go of New Jersey is part of that process. 

 

And in that effort I am sincerely considering a new haircut.  Seriously.  I am thinking of taking it all off.  Starting from scalp and working my way back from there to hair.  We’ll see.

I slept amazingly last night on my brand new Target “firm” pillows and it felt like heaven.  There is nothing like the feel of a new pillow.  The reason for the new pillow of course is another story with not so pleasant details.  My dog, Guinness (half Labrador and half Pit Bull) is somewhat of a compulsive regurgitator. 

It is all his own fault because he tends to inhale things with the ferociousness and velocity of a snake inhaling a tiny mammal, and usually as gross in presentation.  He has swallowed everything from undergarments, to whole pieces of meat, to, and this was the most disturbing of all, a medium size teddy bear head to t0e. 

Anyway, this particular vomitous episode resulted in me getting new pillows so perhaps it was a win-win…except for the poor bedraggled undergarments. 

My other dog is a compulsive urinator and, similarly, has caused the need for new sheets and various other items.  She is actually more of a bored or retaliatory urinator and really quite a brat all around.  She is the reason we will only live in dwellings with hardwood floors from this point on. 

My confession at this point is, however good of a therapist I am, and although I am excellent at diagnosing my dog’s neurosis in human terms, I am an awful dog trainer.  I admit it.  I am the worst alpha pack leader ever.  Caesar Millan would be so disappointed.  But how nice are my new pillows!

And as we begin to pack away the remainder of our home and box everything but essentials piece by piece it seems that my husband and I, as well as our canine counterparts, are getting more and more restless and more and more grumpy with one another. 

I keep thinking of Caesar Millan’s (my doggie guru) wise words on “Dog Whisperer” that explain how dogs feel the owner’s emotions: this fact constantly leaves me feeling delinquent and cruel.  I am, as of late in particular, a ball of frenzied nerves bouncing off the empty walls of our apartment and I am sure my dogs are much worse for the wear. 

I looked around the living room last night at 9:00pm and had to giggle a little at the sight.  My husband collapsed at one end of the couch, me at the other, and both dogs flopped on the floor in similar exhaustion-laden postures.  We are a family of two + dogs all flopped out, crapped out, peed out, and vomited up, just trying to muster our way through these last moments of the dog days of August. 

 

 

And in conclusion…

 (although every writer knows when you are ending something you should never say you are ending it, there is no art and subtlety in it, please excuse my Monday morning abruptness)

… a little  something dog-ified and yog-ified that gave me a Monday morning chuckle.  Images are from the Melia Luxury Pet website where they sell these super cute and yogically-inclined dog bowls that I just might have to break down and get…after the move. 

A.M.:  Everything “After Move” is cataloged in a different time period entirely.

I am breaking up with New Jersey and it is really hard to do.

  I am sorry New Jersey, I know this is going to be hard for you but it is harder for me…I swear.  It’s not you, you did nothing wrong (besides that funky smell by the landfills, the angry traffic-mongers, and the general grumpiness and crowdedness).  Really, it’s me, not you.  I just have to go.  Please, don’t say a word…I know, I know.  We will both be better off in the long run.  We will grow and learn and be better for it.  Shhh, don’t speak…let’s just leave the rest unsaid.

So, as I begin to pack up the last of the boxes and having the final dinners and night’s out with friends and family it is beginning to really sink in: I am leaving New Jersey, I am leaving this life behind, I am beginning yoga school (soon), I am starting a new job (even though it is a transfer), I am starting over.  Now of course these are all things I knew in some conscious/unconscious way the last month or so but the entire decision to execution of this move has only been since July 4th weekend and so everything since then has been sort of a blur of “to-do’s” and denial. 

I am desperately excited and invigorated by this new start; my husband and I beginning our own adventures and experiences that are those of this new family unit of two (+ 2 dogs) we have created.  At the same time I am nostalgic and melancholy over the life I am leaving behind.  It was a perfectly good life: one full of friends, coworkers, a career that I loved, and work I was passionate for. 

I have never left something behind before when it was good, there is a risk and a gamble I suppose in doing so but it also feels like the timing is right.  Like that moment in a movie or a book where you know an exit is necessary even if you are not exactly sure why. 

As I have told my clients before, “We are all the authors of our own lives,” and so I guess this is a chapter I have begun without much of an inkling of how it will wrap itself up.  That would probably be considered poor form and bad storytelling as a novel writer but as I am working within the genre of creative non-fiction I guess I have the leeway to let life become whatever it is meant to be and not try to carve some clever plot point into it. 

Yesterday I attended an event for combat soldiers at a local memorial monument (current and past–although if you ask a soldier I guess there is no past when it comes to being a soldier of war).  A young Iraq veteran in fatigues stood up and thanked those men who came before him for their service and paving the way for him.  I felt myself, standing in the front of the crowd no less, beginning to well up with tears.  I surprised myself, as public displays of emotion are not really my style. 

I think I am kind of raw right now.  Full of my own nostalgia to such a point that I am ready to burst at every evocative thing I find.  Every last session with a client becomes harder to bear, every time I walk into work I think how it is closer to the last time. 

Interestingly enough I am not too worried about leaving friends and family as I am my work.  I know that those people who have been in my life personally and with whom I have deep personal relationships with will sustain: My family will visit and my friends will facebook (ha) but my work is so integral to every day, every moment, every trauma-oriented passion I have…and I only hope I can distill and translate some of what I have done here to somewhere else. 

In those hopes I continue to prepare for yoga school like a nervous child preparing for kindergarten.  Which is how I feel: not sure what to expect, not knowing how I will do, and petrified about headstands–well ok, the last one is not exactly like kindergarten.

My plan is to go home and begin, yes begin because I have yet to start it, my first assigned reading book: The Food Revolution by John Robbins. 

I feel like a delinquent already.