 Photo of reminder string tied around finger “The whole fight would've been avoided if I had remembered not to defend.” “I forgot to tune in to the pain body, so I couldn't get out of my head.” “I was so thrown off I forgot all about dropping judgments about myself and the reaction I was having.” Clients often bring me their dismay at what they fail to remember in the moment. I've written about catching yourself in the old way after you've set a new intention. (It's ch. 18 of Scooch!: Edging into a Friendly Universe, called "The Power to Change.") There, I emphasize that you can celebrate catching yourself—and then don't even bother with that first twirl-and-strike of the whole self-flagellation routine. In fact, think of it as step two in a three-part process: 1) set an intention for the new way, 2) catch yourself doing it the old way, and 3) course-correct toward the new intention. Catching yourself is good: it's the doorway between the old way and the new. In this writing, I want to look at the point of remembering—the moment you catch yourself. I want to invite you to create a lot of spaciousness around what's acceptable to you in terms of when you get there. Short version: Anytime is brilliant. Here's a totally random story from some random woman's life: we'll call her Jaya. If you're anything like her, you may, as she did, catch yourself giving—no, having given—your son the third terse lecture (in that many days) that went on too long about something that wasn't that big of a deal or even fully his fault. (My inner defender puts in, They didn't go on half as long as the lectures used to—but honestly, three sentences in and you're probably into useless reiteration.) So there it is, you caught yourself late in the game. What are your options? The most popular by far is self-flagellation, and, Americans, it's still on sale since Black Friday because you'll probably need extra to get through the holidays. Another option is to sit in the reality of where you are right now. That is, connect to and accept what's actually happening. It doesn't feel good to do this, especially if you have some story going about how you shouldn't be here, you should be beyond this, you should catch yourself much earlier in the process (none of which can be true, because here you are). So okay, it doesn't feel good to be still with what is and let it be. Still, it (really, truly) doesn't feel worse than self-flagellation, and it's much kinder, because it's just a matter of aligning with what's actually happening. In other words, it involves a letting go into what is, not a straining, stretching, contorting into what isn't. And while you're aligning—in the release and relief of that—there's the possibility of allowing or accepting. There's the possibility of what Byron Katie calls loving what is, but if that language feels too strong or somehow false, how about nonresistance? The very word brings in expansive breath. (Parenthetical, potentially life-changing musing: What if you didn't judge yourself, ever?) So I was sitting in the reality of where I was that day, in the driver's seat of the Ithaca Carshare pickup truck (named Beau), with my son in the passenger seat, and Silence sulking between us. But not for long, because I used the moment of remembering (that NOW moment) to fully take in and accept where I was—that being the tail end of that third lecture in so many days and the dismay of finding myself so off. I duly noted that I felt rotten about where I was, and directed some breath to the pain body, that place in my chest that likes to scream like a muted pressure cooker when things aren't going so well. I tell my clients to access the witness in those moments, and if you find you're witnessing with judgment, see if you can just scooch toward the compassionate, dispassionate witness. I scooched. Then I spoke frankly to my son. This went something like, “Buddy, I realize that I've been off for a few days and it upsets me to see myself being this way. I hate hearing myself talk to you this way. I'm a real fan of getting okay with whatever's happening and not thinking there's a problem, but look, I seem to keep reacting like there's a problem. I'm sorry for how that's affecting you. You know, it's possible to just say to someone calmly [here I inserted the super short and entirely neutral version of what I'd just lectured tersely about] and not go [here I inserted some obnoxious noises that were like a meaner version of how adults spoke in the old Charlie Brown cartoons].” (For the younger set: never any words, just semi-musical sounds used as filler to indicate the cartoon kids were stuck listening to and having to respond to what some grown-up was saying that of course had no import to them.) My son said something along the lines of, “I'm glad you notice all that, and [little smile creeping in] I'm really glad you know exactly what it sounds like.” This guy happens to be the best sport on the planet, and as soon as this exchange happened, it was over for both of us. (That is, besides my mental note to get quite clear with myself about what was throwing me off, which I later did—this requires trust that you will indeed get to it and that life or Source or the Universe, in the meantime, will hold it for you; thus, you can truly let it go for now and get present to the business at hand.) We had the truck because we were going to a tree farm to cut our own Christmas tree, and it was the day a bunch of Newfie dogs would be there to haul trees for people, so it was lovely to be there free and clear of tension. We had a great time and got the best tree ever, and a big happy dog named Captain did the drag-it-back-to-the-truck part. It's astonishing to me how often I remember to live in ease and joy and kindness and love. It's amazing that I can be light and present and connected so very often. The fact that I used to be a moody, depressive, overwhelmed victim accounts for the if-I-can-change-anyone-can mentality I bring to my work with clients. I honestly wasn't sure I could. And the thing that accelerated the improvements most was to stop judging myself, my process, how long things took, what I found myself doing again, and so on. (What if you didn't judge yourself, ever?) I learned to drop judgments (not stay out of judgments) and question my thoughts about everything (not be without thoughts) thanks to The Work of Byron Katie. When I started applying all of that to my judgments about myself and the things I believed I could or couldn't be, do, or have—that's when life started getting really good. Bring nonjudgment to the point of remembering. It doesn't matter at what point in the process you catch yourself. When you remember, you're there: You've remembered! You've caught yourself! Excellent! You may prefer to catch yourself when your tone first has the slightest edge of irritability or dismay, but honestly?--you may be in full-blown yelling mode when you come to. You may want to catch yourself when you first speak whatever hints of victim because it contains some I have to, or I can't, or something about how much you do and how hard you work and it's all on you—but you could in reality be two weeks into resentful tones and tense reactions before you notice what you're up to. It may feel great to catch that first nano-flash of your spouse warping weirdly into your parent, way, way, way before you start that pointless and misdirected resisting or confronting or sinking into whatever emotional ploy makes them quit what they're not even really doing. … Ah, dreamer, let it go. Sometimes you might catch yourself that early, and sometimes you just won't. Wherever you catch yourself is good. With that established, how might you remember earlier, or maximize your chances of remembering before being off for three days or weeks or months? On some level, you have to seek to hold onto what you're up to; that is, you need some system to keep it in view. In other words, if you have a vision, you need something to help you hold the vision. (I say there are just three things to do with a vision: have a vision, hold the vision, move toward the vision.) Because you're amnesiac by nature, like every other human being, put something in place to support you in keeping the new vision close at hand. If not, what's close at hand is the old well-rehearsed and -reinforced default, which you've taught yourself to go to for years and years. (This is already true if you're even 21.) You can do this by having a written statement of what you're up to that you review often (daily is lovely; having a day of the week when you sit with it again and check in with how you're doing works too). Post a reminder in a place you'll see it often—or several places: by the kitchen sink, near light switches, on the steering wheel of the car, on your bedside table, in a drawer. Find an image (or a statement in a cool font) that evokes the intention and set it as your computer's desktop background or your phone's lock screen. Talk about it, journal about it, blog about it. Create a piece of art about it and place it where you'll see it. Whatever you're up to, give it enough energy and attention and resources to keep it in view, keep it current, keep remembering. It's so easy to forget. It's not that hard to remember, though; in fact, remembering is effortless—it just happens when it happens. It 's a pretty sure bet that you're more likely to remember if you don't make remembering a miserable affair—justification to be awful to yourself. Love remembering, having fully expected to forget, and step into the remembering anywhere you catch yourself in the process: before your big toe even dips in is as good as when you're up to your thighs in it or well over your head. NOW is the only time you can call yourself back anyway. Now is all you've got for stepping toward your vision. Now is truly all you need: it's the only point of remembering possible. Love & blessings, Jaya
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 This blog post later became a chapter in my book, Scooch: Edging into a Friendly Universe. This is not the final version that made it to print, and I leave it here as it was in September of 2014. Overwhelm is not a given, ever. Not when there's a lot going on and you have no clue how you're going to manage it all; not when you're up against a deadline with one task lined up after the other and not a moment to spare; not when you're in an emotional pressure cooker and life feels frightening and out of control. In such moments, things may indeed be inarguably full. You may benefit from being very diligent or focused, or both. You may choose to accept some discomforts (less sleep than feels good, less peace or leisure than you typically enjoy) to get what you're after. You may have some strong emotions to field. Still, in all of that, overwhelm is optional. So how do you get out of overwhelm when you find yourself in it? How do you learn not to go there when it all feels like too much? I've found a grand solution to overwhelm in Byron Katie's three kinds of business. This is relevant to me personally. My two most often repeated declarations used to be “I'm overwhelmed” and its close cousin, “I'm exhausted.” After The Work of Byron Katie came into my life, it dawned on me at some point that whenever I felt overwhelmed, I was out of my business. I started checking for whose business I was in whenever I felt overwhelmed or heard myself say I was. Invariably, I was out of mine—truly, every single time. I started wondering: Could it be there's no such thing as overwhelm if you live in your own business? Let me go over Katie's three-part model. In your thinking, it's possible for you to be in three kinds of business: yours, someone else's, or the Universe's (she says God's). When Katie talks about the three kinds of business, her emphasis is on self-abandonment: when you're out of your business, you abandon yourself. This is important—crucial—because people tend to correlate the concept of leaving their business with a harsh admonition or that rap on the knuckles: Bad girl! Bad boy! Mind your own business! Get out of my business! That's not your business! Katie's approach is meant to be kind: Come back to yourself. If you're not in your business, you're no longer here to attend to yourself. I find that people are often struck hard when they realize the self-abandonment of it. Seeing this, they get very serious, realizing how far afield they habitually go, about getting back to their own business. The way Katie speaks it, when you're out of your business, you're over there telling God how to run things or telling other people how to live their lives, so no one's here for you. (Katie's conceptualization of God, by the way, is very open-ended, non-patriarchal, and not based on a human image—certainly not a white bearded guy in the sky: for her, God is reality. Reality rules; what is, is.) My favorite metaphor for being out of your business is treading water. When you're taking care of what's yours to take care of, applying agency where you've actually got it, you move forward. It's like completing a lap or swimming across the imaginary alligator pit to that dock across the pond: you actually get somewhere, even if through some harrowing adventures. Conversely, when you're out of your business, you exert yourself trying to apply agency where you don't have it, so nothing gets accomplished. You exert, exert, exert until you exhaust yourself (I'm overwhelmed, I'm exhausted), and at some point you may well feel like you're drowning. A pre-med student gearing up for MCATs, for example (somehow I've talked to more than one of these, living as I do in an Ivy-League college town), could slip out of her business in any number of compelling and torturous ways. If she brings to her test preparation how much time she's got to prepare (is it enough?), the score she needs (what if a good school doesn't want her?), the actual score she'll get (outcome!), the competition (horrendous in the med-school world), the steps still to follow the test (including potentially terrifying interviews—and what will they think of her? … she gets so weirdly inarticulate in such moments), what it will be like to be a resident functioning on interrupted sleep while absorbing crazy amounts of life-and-death information, and how on earth she'll manage to cultivate a solid and juicy relationship so she can somehow gracefully juggle family and work one day—holy hell! Is this manageable? If she comes back to her business, she's down to one thing: prepare as best she can for the test in the time she's got left to prepare in. That's definitely manageable. Let me ask an obvious question because it bears asking. Which maximizes the chance of a good outcome? Staying in her business and simply preparing as thoroughly as she can, or going out of her business to theirs and God's and carrying and managing (in her poor, taxed pain body) all the anxiety this produces? And while I'm asking the obvious, one more: which is more likely to keep her out of overwhelm? It's mostly pretty obvious when and where you go into other people's business, but there are any number of times you might go there without quite realizing you're not where you belong. This may happen with your should concepts, your wonderful ethics and (truly) great ideas about how people ought to treat each other, drive safely, talk to their children or siblings, get out of codependence, run meetings more efficiently, buy local—you name it. But if you're not the one doing the treating, driving, talking, getting out, running, or buying, you're in someone else's business, visiting your fabulous ethics (Katie calls them your sacred concepts) on others. And are you clear about staying out of their thoughts of you? It's common, perhaps universal, for people to very much want to manage what others think of them. The idea that doing so takes you out of your business isn't Katie's brainchild. Folks in the 12-step world love to declare some version of, “What other people think of me is none of my business.” As for the Universe's business, it's whatever no one can control, certainly not you. I like to flag outcomes and time as the two classic categories here that are likely to get most anyone in trouble. Outcomes are clear enough: how it all turns out. You can't know before it's revealed. What you can do is locate the ways you can appropriately influence the end result: what's actually yours to do to move toward your desired outcome (or your vision)? That's your business. Beyond where you have power to effect outcome, let go. Give it to the Universe (put it in the God box, if you will.) Your slice of the pie may be quite large or a tiny sliver: identify what that actually is, focus your efforts there, and see about cultivating detachment for the rest. This could look like catching yourself in a worry or prediction about outcome and coming back to NOW—always your business—and to what you can do or, even more precise, to what's yours to do here and now. Remind yourself the Universe holds the rest. Time includes timing—that is, how long it will take, when you'll get there, how quickly anything else will happen—even if your part's on hold till it does—when the emotion will ease up. (Yes, even when rage, sorrow, or grieving will let go of its grip on you. If it's out of your control, it's not your business. But you can certainly mind the pain body from the perspective of the compassionate, dispassionate witness. Minding your pain body—part of self-care—is always your business.) Time also includes the past and the future, as most of your business happens here and now. Note that in-your-business time travel (such as going to the future to plan and prepare, or the past to rectify something) won't land you in stress. If you're in stress while mentally visiting past or future, and if there's no action on your part involved, you're almost certainly out of your business. As for the past, you're out of your business there when you're going over it in ways that aren't useful, revisiting what just doesn't need to be revisited again. A useless foray into the past is often characterized by blame, regret, sorrow, longing, or believing that what's over and done should still be happening, that whatever happened shouldn't have happened (or not as it did), that anything or anyone gone should still be here, or that you'd somehow be better off now if something hadn't happened or if this moment still held what is no more. If you're visiting the past in therapy, for example, in a way that brings ease, insight, forgiveness, letting go, you're in your business. If you're reviewing the same scenes with your shrink five, ten, twenty years later (“Please,” a new client said to me, “not one more word about my father”), you're almost certainly out of your business again and may well benefit from another modality. If you're visiting the past with joy and gratitude, you don't even need to wonder whose business you're in. Likewise, when you go into the future unnecessarily, you're in the Universe's business. You may legitimately need to go there to troubleshoot or to plan or to coordinate things with other people. But whenever you're there to worry and make bleak predictions of all that will go wrong or what you can't have or won't get to—out of your business. I like to invite people to notice what portion of their time in the future is actually time they belong there. Most find it's quite a small percentage. Finally, I want to flag that you're in the Universe's business when you declare limitations or character flaws as if they were universal laws. I especially find myself pointing this out to people when they're in self-judgments, which for many people are far more harsh than anything they direct toward others. You can't do that, you won't get there, you don't get to, you're not capable, you're too flawed? Who are you to declare that about anyone, even yourself? There's no universal law that says you can't create, thrive, and fulfill your potential alongside every other human being. Come back to your business, which is to hold a vision and move toward a vision; let the Universe show you what you can and can't get to. In terms of overwhelm, it's crucial that you stay out of the Universe's business. Do I need to tell you that you're not equipped to do the job of the Universe? If you'll excuse the G-word here, do I need to remind you that you're not God? (I've had cause to remind myself, trust me.) How could anyone be anything but overwhelmed seeking to take care of the turning of the planets or of the hands on the clock, the weather, the unexpected, natural disasters, and most anything to do with life and death, war and peace, what is or isn't possible, and the way it ultimately will or did turn out?  So when you're overwhelmed, ask yourself two simple questions. First, “Whose business am I in right now?” Find where you're in others' business or the Universe's: you will surely be in one or the other, if not both. Then ask this follow-up question: “So what is my business here?” Once you locate your business, go there. You'll be right where you need to be. You might feel instant relief. Even if your actual business isn't a comfortable place to be for the moment, you'll still be equipped to manage it. A pre-med student is entirely capable of spending an evening preparing for a test. She isn't capable, that same evening, to manage her entire schooling and career while coming to grips with how to manage the balance of work and home life in such a demanding profession. Sometimes your first order of rightful business, when you come back to it, is simply to mind the pain body that got activated when you left. Stay with yourself kindly and gently. Access that compassionate, dispassionate witness as you breathe. And from there, take care of what else is yours to take care of, checking in periodically to give awareness and breath to the pain body as you go. It's certainly possible for what's actually your business to be quite sizable and daunting. If that's the case, trying to manage all of it at once puts you right out of your business again. You can't swallow the whole ocean. You can, however, pull out one bucketful and do something with that. So take large tasks or situations and make it your business to break them down into bite-sized, manageable pieces, then show up now and now and now for each task before you. You can only do one at a time anyway, whatever's up right here and now. (Okay, sometimes you can multitask. Do that if it makes the most sense and keeps you in your business. And note that you can only multitask so much. I like to get Zen about it and say, When you're multitasking, just multitask.) If there's a long string of tasks and a deadline looming, be clear about how much time you can allot to each one. This may mean relaxing your standards a bit. Is your mind going to what your boss or client will think of what you present, or whether you'll get done on time or not? You're out of your business, unless you're reevaluating how you want to proceed. Worry (or any stressful emotion) is a clear sign you're out of your business. Then there's the phenomenon I call arranging the button drawer. Don't color-code the button drawer when it's time to move through the whole of a project (paper, proposal, decluttering). Somehow this idea came from living with a kid who loves to let a room get to alarming levels of chaos before cleaning it. She'd then declare a day of cleaning, and when I checked on her three hours later, she would show me some painstaking task she'd conquered in the realm of minutia (Look, all the buttons are arranged by size and color in this drawer!) while chaos reigned all around. It's a good idea to take care of any momentous task in an unpolished way to get it from start to finish, then go back in and tweak toward perfection as time allows. There's no staying, in life. As with everything else, you can't stay in your business. You can't stay out of overwhelm. You can, however, hold the intention to live in your business, free of any sensation coursing through you or lodging somewhere in your body related to the idea that it's all more than you can bear. With the intention in place to live without overwhelm, catch yourself there (you'll land there again, so be willing to catch yourself kindly) and check out whose business you're in. Having found that you're out of your business, you can then simply come back to what's actually yours to mind. That's as good as it gets, and it's plenty good enough. Love & blessings, Jaya |
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