Meditashunned

Well whaddya know. A whole Oprah show about being happy. Once again it has become very clear, that I am not the only one suffering from this unhappiness plague. And after taking her quiz about what makes people happy, covering everything from jobs to sex to where I live, I came to one conclusion: If I want to be happy, I have to meditate or be Goldie Hawn. And since I’ve tried everything to become the latter with no success, I figured I’d try the former. 

Now I’ve attempted this whole meditation thing before. It’s a crucial aspect of yoga and probably the one thing that challenges me most when I’m on the mat. My significant other, “P”, does this every morning as well and finds great benefit in it, as I know thousands of other people do. But for me, meditating is just mega-frustrating. (And I hadn’t even attempted it at home yet.) But if Oprah says that just ten minutes a day will make me happy, then what the hell. I mean c’mon, if Oprah told me to guzzle gasoline, I’d probably do it. And what’s ten minutes?

I turned off the television, sat down cross-legged on the hardwood floor, and resting my hands on my knees with my thumb and pointer touching, I closed my eyes. I know that meditating is all about the breath. So that’s what I did - focused on the breath. I inhaled deeply through my nose and then out again. In through the nose, and back out. This wasn’t so bad. It was just breathing after all. I felt the air fill my lungs which naturally straightened my back. And as I felt the cool air come in and the hot air escape, I thought about how a buddhist monk once told me to imagine inhaling a white cloud of positive energy and to exhale the big, black puff of evil negativity. I wondered how if the good is inhaled and the bad is exhaled, what inside of us turned the good to bad? What smoke monster did I have lurking within my body? Was it like this corrupt cloud converter that worked like a machine inside Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory? And was it in my chest where the air was processed or was it in that convoluted brain of mine? And why did I go to that buddhist monk in the first place? Shit. I was thinking, not meditating. GO AWAY THOUGHTS!

Back to it. I had to focus! Really big inhale. Now really big exhale. Damnit! Now I’d blown snot out. Should I get up to get a tissue or would I have to start over then? Should I use my sleeve or did real meditators just leave the mucous all over their face? QUIT THINKING AND JUST MEDITATE! Quick sleeve action and I was back to it. Inhale. Exhale. In with the good. Out with the bad. I remembered that a friend told me that she took a meditation workshop and one of the techniques was to imagine pins zig-zagging through the breath in your body, poking holes in it from your head to your toes. So I zigged those pins right through every bit of air, so much so that I thought all my good air (or was it bad air?) must look like swiss cheese by now. Mmmmm....cheeeese. Cheese would be a great post meditative snack. How long did I have? Man it had only been six minutes! Shit! Now my eyes were open looking at the clock! How did that happen? Ugh. 

Ok. Four more minutes. I could do this. I squeezed my eyes shut and focused. In and out. In and out. I rubbed my thumb and fore-finger together to try to bring me into the present moment. I had a wicked hangnail I was dying to tear off, but no. I couldn’t. Not now. That could be my reward when I was finished. That and the cheese. Keep breathing. In and out. In and out. I eventually felt myself loosen up and relax a bit. Did that mean I had done it? Was I finished? How would I check the clock again without cheating and opening my eyes. I decided to count ten more full breaths and then I’d let myself check the clock. I’d begun to slump like Quasimodo, so I straightened up to make sure I did it completely correctly for a good ten breaths. 3. 2. 1. Oh good. I’d gone a whole extra minute. Did that mean I only had to do nine minutes tomorrow?

As I hopped up off the floor, thankful it was over, I wondered how I was supposed to feel. How long did it take for the happy to set in? Just a day? A week? A year? I wished it made me as instantly happy as this cheese did. I contemplated the possibility that the meditation had made me think about the cheese, and so maybe, in a really odd six-degrees-from-Kevin-Bacon-sorta-way, did the meditation actually bring me this little piece of cheesy happiness?? Yeah yeah. It’s a stretch. So I guess I’ll just keep trying this whole deep-breathing, snot-blowing exercise.  And in hopes that I find other happy tips, I’ll keep watching Oprah. And that makes me f**king happy. 

My faux-called-life

Today I realized that I’ve gone an entire day without saying a word. Ok that’s a lie. I said goodbye to my partner (my we’ve-been-together-a-long-ass-time-and-plan-on-continuing-it companion), as he left for work first thing this morning. But not another utterance in the past ten hours. That’s because I seem to have made a career out of my couch. And since no one else has chosen this oh-so-professional path (at least not MY couch), I have no couch coworkers, there’s no sofa socializing, and so the only water-cooler discussions I have are with my dog. If I could teach him to fetch me the water, so I wouldn’t have to go get my own in the first place, I’d give myself a much needed promotion in this very lucrative occupation.

I moved to California a year and a half ago when my partner (we’ll call him “P”) was offered a great job opportunity out here. We were buried in boredom and snow in New England, and so it wasn’t a hard decision to make. We opted for sunshine. The Golden State. The land of food and wine. But apparently, unless you do nothing but consume the food and wine 24 hours a day (which I’ve tried), life isn’t instantly sunny. 

I gave up my job in Boston without too much hesitation, as even though I had had a fair amount of success, I was over it. I looked at California like people in third-world countries look at America. Like I had been starved, battered, chained and left naked in the blistering cold of Massachusetts and now finally, the rescue ship had come to take me away to the free world. The kingdom of opportunity. CALIFORNIA!! Get a job? No problem. I mean I was a writer. And this was L.A. They even have a guild (whatever that is) for folks like me. This would be a piece of cake. Turns out it was a piece of upside down cake, because that’s what it did to my career. 

I’ve freelanced on and off since arriving, but have had nothing stable. And soooo... most of the day I sit. If the depression wasn’t hanging over me like a fat man’s belly roll, I’d use this time as an opportunity to bask in the sunshine like the people in magazines do. I’d spend hours in the gym in an attempt to finally see something on my body that stays still when I push on it. Or maybe I’d pick up one of the countless hobbies I always bitch about not having time for. You know, one of those pretty pastimes your girlfriends from high school that you stalk on Facebook are always doing. Like sewing or crafting or pottery.  But I don’t. Which thus perpetuates the cycle of gloom.

And as someone who battles depression when things are going well, I don’t exactly know what to do with this whole thing people call unemployment. I now have nothing to distract me from the people in my head. No paycheck to spend on the vices I use to get through the big D. No lunch meetings where I schmooze and booze and fake my way through, hee-hawing about how life is grand.  I HAVE NO PRETEND LIFE ANYMORE!  

I know what you’re thinking. Aren’t I supposed to trying to find the positive in all this and not just keeping a blog of bellyaching? Yes. Yes, I am. But what seems like a negative actually became kind of a nice relief for me today. My existence before was just as I stated. It was pretend. It was my faux-life. So even though most of the time, my current three-cushioned “office” seems pretty bleak, it’s much more comfortable than the cube. I might not have said anything today. But I only spoke the truth. And I really think (or am vehemently trying to convince myself) that one day I’ll look back on this period as the era in which I became my true authentic self. Even if I am just a non-crafty, Facebook stalking, upside-down cake eater. And that makes me pretty f**king happy.

If you're not happy and you know it, write a blog.

Have you ever noticed how many books there are about being happy? Well, not really about being happy. More about becoming happy. Discovering your happy. About how all the happy pros got happy. About how to help your happy. How to open your happy. How to shit happy. There are pages and pages of happy.

I know this because I stumbled upon the apparent “happy” section of the bookstore the other day, while browsing the self-help books for all of my issues that I didn’t know I had. What struck me more than anything was that this “happy” department was actually very unhappy. I mean if there are this many reads on the subject, then there must be a lot of really miserable people out there. Why, I don’t know. But what I do know, is that I am one of them.

I’ve been depressed for years, possibly decades. So much so, that I don’t really even know how long. But this year has been particularly dismal. And as I squeak down the curly slide toward hell, I’m beginning to get a little nauseous. So I’m self-medicating with a blog (my healthiest pain-killer to date) about my attempts at my own happiness.

I’ve tried to unearth my happiness in many ways. Particularly in new fields of work. In my most recent endeavor, I went through yoga teacher training. Yogis seem to be really happy people. I mean there’s lots of peace, love, and light spewing out of their mouths, even while perched in pigeon pose longer than the dreadful bird actually lives. So I figured maybe they’d tell me the secret if I pay them enough money, do enough headstands and not fall asleep at the end. Some great things came from my karmic crack at cloud nine, but when it ended, my depression had not.

But looking back, there was one thing that I didn’t do. On the first day, our guru told us that we would have one homework assignment over the next three months that would not be checked, nor graded. It was for our own personal fulfillment. We were to keep a gratitude journal. Each day we were to record something for which we were grateful. Now I dismissed this rather quickly, as I had enough yoga sutras to read and sanskrit to study. I had no time for silly games that people normally play around the Thanksgiving table (well, at least they do on TV - my family is thankful just to get food before it’s gone). But maybe this journal, or lack there of, is the one thing blocked my bliss.

So maybe, keeping with the acknowledgement theme of the gratitude journal, if I chronicle my daily contrived euphoria, I can maneuver my way through the manure and into the real thing. And if not, well at least I did something today besides eat half a loaf of bread and watch “I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant.” And for that, I am really f**king happy.