Friday, June 21. 2019

    After yoga class today, Heather, the yoga instructor, showed me an Alexander exercise. This produced terrific results. She told me to grab under my ribs with both hands and pull them up, then relax my shoulders and bring my arms down. It evened out my body immediately.  Now, I took a course in the Alexander Technique at my dance studio when I lived in Princeton, and I read the book.  I don’t remember any exercise like this.  It worked like a charm.  I wish Mike were still alive so I could teach it to him.  Maybe he would have responded to this.  Usually, when I gave him suggestions on how to stand straighter, he would adjust his posture, sarcastically say, “Wow, This is comfortable,” and immediately revert to his old habitual stance.
    After Bikram, I went to the bank to deposit checks. There was a long line, but it went surprisingly quickly.    After that, I went to the transfer station to drop off the several brown paper bags of glass I had loaded in the car yesterday. The last stop was a Kaiser to pick up my medication for my UTI.
    When I got home, I called LSW, where I have an annuity I built up while I was working at Licking Heights in Ohio.  I asked them to email a change of beneficiary form.  This should be the last piece of the financial puzzle.  After this is completed, I will hard mail Damon, who is the executor of the will when I pass, all the documents telling him where the money is hidden and who to contact in the event of my death to tell them to stop sending money.  

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Musings:  I’m putting this separately so those who are not interested can choose not to read it.

    The work I did with my therapist led me to thoughts about what it would mean to be born without sin, as Jesus and the Virgin Mary are said to be.  Now I’m not getting into a discussion about the validity of any religious beliefs.  I’m interested here in what these stories, whether real or not, tell us about us human beings, and yes, help us to become better people.
    How does this sound: to be born without sin means to be born without hatred for others. Now, I don’t mean a big hatred where we hate whole groups of people for being different from us or some person who did something terrible to hurt us.  I mean the little hatreds we have for people we also love and depend on and who love and depend on us.  Those moments of annoyance or frustrations where rage just surges in us.  We often use the words, “ I could just kill you.” They are meaningless.  They certainly do not contain any serious threat. But, do these words implicitly reflect that inner rage that we all carry inside when people don’t do what we want or do something we don’t want? That surge of rage comes from a primitive part of our brains. With any luck, we are not ruled by it but simply understand its reactivity as information about our boundaries.
    My thought is that we can say that Jesus suffered like a real human but never had that inner rage; he never felt any anger toward his torturers or those who betrayed or even disappointed him.  Maybe that’s what it means to be born without sin.  This is important for me. I watched my mother give vent to her frustrations on my sister and me.  She felt no need to control herself. Close to the end of her life, she said to me, “I never needed therapy; I had children.” I didn’t ask her to clarify her thinking, but I’m pretty sure that she meant that she was able to vent her frustration and therefore feel better; that was her concept of the function of therapy. It never occurred to her that she might have done damage to her children in the process.
    Mike’s mother behaved similarly. She acted out all over the place.  I think she just thought that was who she was, and change wasn’t possible. It was when I clearly saw that rage in myself that I swore I would never have children.  I didn’t want to pass on this behavior.  I didn’t want to do to my children what had been done to me, and I had no reason at the time to think that the emotional surge was normal; it was the behavior that wasn’t, and I could change.
    I have been hard on myself for these feelings all my life. I desperately did not want to be like my mother. But as so often happens, we go to the opposite extreme. I set a goal for myself that was literally inhuman, which does not mean that having that goal improved my behavior immediately.  While I think I have improved, I accept that the perfection I had in mind is out of reach for me in the human condition. To be human means to feel these frustrations and responded with anger, but it if not to act it out.  I’ve had to learn to forgive myself for being human.
    I think the story of Jesus is there to remind us that while it is worth striving for the ideal that he represents, it is never an attainable goal for us mere mortals.  We have to learn to live within our own parameters and do the best we can.
    It was through Buddhist meditation that I learned much of this self-acceptance. Buddha was talking about these frustrations and reactions over 2000 years ago. They’re not new in our modern world. It was there that I received instructions on how to deal with those feeling and reduce if not eliminate my reactivity.  I was finally able to change.
    Judy, my very, very Catholic friend, argued that Jesus did experience anger, but it was righteous anger.  I know the difference within myself between righteous anger and that other kind. Whatever you want to call it. They feel very different. They come from different places in my body. However, I once expressed ‘righteous’ anger in a totally inappropriate situation. What had happened was trivial.  Rage, righteous or otherwise, was not appropriate.  So much for being sure about what’s right and what’s wrong. God’s little joke on us. Go forth and be good people, ah, yes, and do it with this handicap.