Allowing Happiness
June 23, 2011 at 2:29 pm | Posted in beliefs, emotions, family patterns, parenting, peace | Leave a commentTags: beliefs, emotions, happiness, mirroring, withholding happiness
I’ve written before about how children are a mirror of what we don’t notice in ourselves, and about my surprise the first time I heard LB use expressions I only later noticed in myself. You’d think by now I’d have learned that if I see something in them it’s going to be lurking somewhere within this being I call myself. Sometimes, truth be told, there are times when I haven’t wanted to see it, and other times just as in a hall of mirrors, the reflection is distorted. It pays to look beneath the obvious.
A few months ago we went on a family outing to a large furniture store (you know the one, it’s all over the world). The plan was to buy a lamp for LB’s room to replace a broken one. As we walked round she saw other things she wanted: a set of pastry cutters, some ornaments and a plant. Mostly I said yes, occasionally no.
We then went to a large outlet warehouse, where LB got a new tee-shirt, but not some jackets she also wanted. Lolo asked for an alarm clock, and got it. We went to a pet shop for hamster food. LB wanted a frilled neck lizard. We said no.
All the way home LB raged. We were horrible parents. It wasn’t fair. She’d wanted one all her life, and we never let her have it. It would never happen. It just wasn’t fair.
I felt annoyed. Couldn’t she feel grateful for what she had got instead of focusing on what she hadn’t? Yes, I remembered my blog post on gratitude, and knew that no, in that moment she couldn’t be grateful if she wasn’t. Yet still I longed to stem the seemingly endless wanting that I could see no way to satisfy. (Yes, I was trying to control her experience.) Actually she said she was grateful for what she’d got AND angry that we would never let her have the lizard. Later she said she didn’t really want any of the “other rubbish”, she only wanted the one thing she hadn’t got.
I tried to explain we did take her feelings into account. (Okay, really what I was trying to do was to get her to see it my way and to defend my decision – now, what is it Katie says about defence being the first act of war?) We had the debate about whether there’s room in our house for a another pet. That led nowhere except to me briefly wondering how on earth I’d managed to make such a mess of parenting that my child appeared to be a bottomless pit of wanting. I told LB that if I believed that giving her this lizard would make her truly happy I might have considered it, if it had been possible. (And yes, it crossed my mind that I wasn’t 100% honest, because of course it would be possible, just not very convenient. Our house already feels cramped to me, without a lizard that needs a large heated tank!) I said that I suspected she would feel pleased for a while but that the wanting would soon come back.
Not surprisingly, this didn’t satisfy her, and I felt frustrated at the apparent gulf between us. We began to bridge that gulf when I recognised that we both wanted for her to feel happy, we just had differing perspectives on how that could be achieved.
Then I noticed that she was not allowing herself to be happy unless she got this lizard, and it occurred to me that if she wasn’t allowing herself to be happy unless the various conditions were met, she’d learned to do that from someone. She certainly was capable of allowing herself to be happy as a baby!
Happiness comes naturally when our minds are still
So where to did I not allow myself to be happy? Not long before, on a Sedona Method weekend course, I had noticed a belief that I couldn’t be happy if others weren’t. And by others I did mean everyone in the entire world. No pressure there then! Nearer home I had not been allowing myself to be happy until LB was well (she’d been repeatedly ill for months.) And I need to make my mother happy first, the cats, the hamster, that sad looking person I saw on the bus…
Okay, so can I just start with me? Can I allow myself to feel the joy of sitting here typing, smiling at my own silly sense of humour?
Feeling miserable and guilty because others are unhappy doesn’t help them one bit, and yet there is such a tendency to think it’s selfish to be happy if others aren’t. I’ve begun to think of it this way: am I more likely to be of service to someone else if I am caught up in worry and fear or if I am peaceful? Being happy doesn’t stop me caring about another’s feelings, it just frees me to understand them better. Since the lizard incident there have been a couple more of these desperate wantings of LB’s, and I realised they occur just before she begins to recover from an illness. Lately it’s been easier to sit with her and not feel I have to do anything other than be there and allow the feelings to come and go. Lately too there are moments when joy simply erupts within me for no apparent reason.
Where do you withhold happiness from yourself? What needs to be fixed before you can allow yourself to feel bliss? Could you allow yourself to be happy even if your loved ones aren’t? Could you allow yourself to feel happy just because?
Every Breath You Take
June 2, 2008 at 10:52 am | Posted in Buteyko, family, family patterns | 1 CommentTags: asthma, Buteyko
Lolo was born a little early – three months and two days to be exact. We’re incredibly lucky, not just because she survived, but because her only obvious the long term repercussion was a tendency to get asthma whenever she got a cold. You might notice I’ve used past tense. I can’t say for sure she won’t asthma again, but I’m optimistic.
It wasn’t always like this. There was a time when we had a fold-out bed permanently ready in our bedroom for those nights when she was taking sixty breaths a minute and I feared each one would be her last.
I wanted to avoid steroid inhalers, so we tried all sorts of complementary therapies. For a while homeopathy seemed to control the attacks but choosing the correct remedy was challenging to say the least, and strangely enough, asthma attacks don’t always come when your homeopath is at home, waiting for a frantic mother to call! Lolo ended up on oral steroids so often that the preventative inhaler became essential. Even so, by the time she started school she was getting more prolonged attacks with every cold.
Then I read about a woman whose asthma had healed with the Buteyko Method of breathing. Buteyko was a Russian doctor who discovered that people with asthma were over-breathing – sounds crazy but several clinical trials have shown his technique to be effective in reducing asthma. The theory is that when we over-breathe we lose too much carbon dioxide, and it is essential for getting oxygen from our haemoglobin into the body. When we exercise or when we get stressed our breathing naturally increases. That’s fine, so long as it settles back when the exercise or danger is over. Of course, nowadays the dangers we face are rarely things we need big breathing for – that bear of a motorist you’re so mad at isn’t actually a bear at all, but your body breathes big, ready to bop him over the head or flee like the wind. And so, meeting bears on a daily basis on the way to work, you breathe in just a little too much over a long period of time, and that’s how you end up with a big breathing habit. (With Lolo it probably started because she needed ventilating as a baby, and because of lung infections she had in her first few months of life. I’ve also seen her go into an asthma attack after getting upset and angry.)
There was no Buteyko teacher in our city, so I didn’t pursue it. Then after Lolo had once again missed a week of school I rang any teacher within sixty miles, and one was willing to come five days in a row to teach Lolo in our home, provided we paid his petrol – an indication of the passion Buteyko teachers show.
Lolo was less passionate about doing the exercises. We persevered, and for almost two years she got by without an attack. We reduced her inhaler, she seemed to manage.
But she didn’t see why she should do her exercises when her sister was playing or reading a book. Her ‘Steps’ were just an annoying thing that her annoying mother asked her to do, and if she spoke in the middle of them or opened her mouth and took a huge gulp of air, then her totally annoying mother asked her to do them all over again. Not cool. And her annoying mother sometimes got annoyed too, so now there were two people having tantrums and flouncing about the place. If Daddy wasn’t at work it was easier to get him to supervise; he didn’t usually make her redo them if she cheated, he often didn’t even notice the sneaky breaths she took in the middle when she was supposed to be holding her breath.
The asthma came back. My thoughts ran something like this: I’m a failure. It’s my fault because my anxiety stresses her too, and that’s why she has asthma. Buteyko’s nonsense anyway, it doesn’t really work – I was just grabbing at straws, and so what if there have been clinical trials that show its effectiveness, it’s not working for us. I look such a fool, since I’ve told dozens of people it works. It’s all my own stupid fault, and I might as well give up and just accept she’s going to be on a steroid inhaler for the rest of her life. And on and on…
But I do The Work, so I knew I didn’t have to believe any of those thoughts.
I’m a failure – is that true? Hmm, now I think about it: two years asthma-free could be considered a success, and this attack was mild compared to what she used to get. And let’s not take this quite so personally, just how is it ‘my’ failure or success really?
How do I react when I think this thought? I feel like giving up, which of course would make me even more of a failure in my mind. I feel angry and guilty, and want to find someone else to blame so I don’t have to feel that guilt. I imagine people sneering at me, saying what an idiot I am.
Okay, I can see that lot’s pretty stressful. So who would I be without this thought?
Hunting through the magazine I read a few days before to find the phone number of a Buteyko teacher who now covers this city. Taking Lolo to see her for a refresher course. Discovering it wasn’t so much about success or failure as about learning from mistakes and moving on.
Lolo learned too. She learned that if she opens her mouth in the middle of her steps and takes a sneaky breath then she’s cheating herself, not me. Days later we discovered that she had a belief, “I’ll never to able to do it.” And when we looked at that belief she discovered there was no way she could know that, and that believing it made her not want to try, made her feel like – guess what – a failure, angry, and thinking, “It’s not fair.”
Without the thought she would just do her steps and see what happened.
And what happened was she gradually began to do more and more, her breathing got better and better. Two months ago she could only hold her breath comfortably for five seconds, now she usually manages between thirty-five and thirty-nine seconds. She swam a width of the local swimming pool underwater a couple of weeks ago. (About twenty metres.) She can hold her breath longer than I can now, considerably longer. She has a cold just now, and so far, no asthma.
In the interests of balance I’ve been surfing the internet reading about various trials and opinions on Buteyko, and what I found was a huge number of sites with evidence it works and a few that say we don’t know enough yet to know that. Usually the doubters also say it seems to work for some patients so long as they are willing to put in the effort required to do the exercises. In other words it’s easier to take a puff on an inhaler, but easier for how long and at what cost?
It may not surprise you that LB and I are now doing the exercises – they can help with a lot more than just asthma. I’ve been doing them for a week now, and I notice a difference – I went for a run a few hours ago, and didn’t puff and pant and need to breathe through my mouth. I can’t pretend I’ve found it easy; I’m still getting used to breathing into my abdomen (I breathe too high) and the exercises have brought some interesting beliefs to the fore. Yes, one of them was “I’ll never to able to do it,” and no, I don’t feel guilty that I passed that belief on to my child, just pleased that we can do The Work on these beliefs as they appear.
If you are interested in knowing more about Buteyko, there are teachers in many parts of the world. I found this article particularly good at explaining why it works.
http://www.buteyko.co.nz/buteyko/work/default.cfm
I also recommend this article by Una Mooney, which provides an illuminating explanation of development of asthma in young children.
http://www.buteykoinscotland.co.uk/children.htm
Mirrors
March 20, 2008 at 5:41 pm | Posted in family patterns, parenting | Leave a commentOne night when my elder daughter was about eighteen months old, she and I were upstairs getting ready for her bath. She wandered out onto the landing and stood on tiptoe peeping over the stair gate. In a sing-song voice she called out, “Jeh-eee!” (My husband’s name is Jerry.) She stood quietly for a few moments, and then she said, “Oh-uh.”
What a funny thing to do, I thought. Why is she doing that?
A few nights later it was bath-time again, and I realised I’d forgotten the little blanket she took to bed. My husband was downstairs in the kitchen, so I went to the top of the stairs and called out to him (yes you’ve guessed – in a sing-song voice.) After a while I realised that with the kitchen door shut and radio on he couldn’t hear me. Feeling a bit stupid that I’d ever imagined he might, I said, “Oh-uh.”
So now I knew why she did it.
Of course I’d been aware that children copy adults: I’d seen her clap when I did, heard her repeat songs we’d sung to her. I’d seen that she wanted to carry her own little backpack like everyone else when we went on holiday with her older cousins. Yet somehow I didn’t, till then, realise how closely she watched, how much she absorbed, how in some ways she knew me better than I knew myself.
Children are like mirrors to the unknown depths of ourselves. We see our own behaviours and sayings repeated in them, and it’s not always what we want to see. I felt like a terrible mother the day I heard my child scold her dolls for not going to sleep. (Even now I feel the urge to explain myself to you, to tell you in detail about the sleepless nights that led me to that. But you can guess: you’ve been there too, if not with sleep issues, then with some other.) I have also experienced moments of amazement upon realising that she had absorbed what I saw as the good in me, like the time, aged 2 or 3, that she crouched down, and said to her little sister, “I love you. Even when I’m angry at you, I still love you.”
And of course, we too were once children, we too once absorbed all that our parents were and did. My daughter may have stood at the stair gate and called her father’s name because she wanted to see him, but did she have the faintest idea why she waited a few moments and then said ‘Oh,’ in that particular way? Do we adults have any idea why we believe half the things we do?
In some ways it’s easy to see that patterns of being are passed down through generations – we notice that we react like our own parents did when our child refuses to do as bidden – or more likely we notice that our spouse does! What’s harder to notice is that this happens because we go on believing thoughts that aren’t even ours, that are passed on from generation to generation. Sometimes we even think we are doing the opposite of what our parents did (and when we think that we usually believe ours is the right way). Yet underneath the reactive actions could be the exact same thoughts our parents had. Nancy Friday describes this in My Mother, My Self. She writes about how women she interviewed often believed their lives were very different from their mothers’. “Mother lived in a house, the woman I was talking to lived in an apartment. Mother never worked a day in her life, the daughter held down a job. We cling to these ‘facts’ as proof that we have created our own lives, different from hers. We overlook….that we have taken on her anxieties, fears angers; the way we weave the web of emotion between ourselves and others is patterned on what we had with her.”
As I’ve written on the ‘About’ page on this blog, the best way that I know to open out from thought patterns that have existed for generations is to use The Work, the process developed by Bryon Katie. (There will be other ways that work for other parents, and I invite readers of this blog to use the comments section to describe what works for you.) When I read Byron Katie’s book Loving What Is, I was at first surprised to read that she realised she didn’t think, she was ‘being thought’. For me now, what that means is thoughts come unbidden into my mind, and I have a choice to believe them or not. I’ve found that when I believe things should be a certain way, far from bringing what I want, this creates stress and prevents me from being able to find other solutions. It’s as if my mind is so stuffed full that there’s no room for other possibilities, and using The Work loosens up whatever barriers there might be to finding new solutions. Instead of frantically believing I have to know the answers, when the old thought patterns get undone it’s as if the mind relaxes enough to naturally open up and allow new possibilities. We become like children again, ready to learn – only now with some choice in what we absorb!
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