For the last twenty years, my garage has been overflowing with other people’s possessions: boxes, paintings and frames, dishes and china, photo albums, clothing, furniture, art work, paper work. You name it. I have stored it. Most of these items never get picked back up again. People move or they forget that they have put them there. People pass away. It has become the land of forgotten things.
This week, I spent four full days cleaning out my garage and getting rid of everything that is not mine or in active use. The junk guys had to do three pick ups from my house. It was epic and exhausting but I feel a great sense of accomplishment, ease and joy now that it is done. I have reclaimed this space. It is no longer cluttered, clogged and impossible to walk in. It is spacious and open.
It is interesting how physical spaces are often a reflection of our internal lives. I have only recently learned how to set boundaries and to say no. I was never taught this skill as a child, and if anything, I was actively taught that I should always say yes to others. No matter my own needs, the needs of others always came first.
I have since learned that this is neither healthy or sustainable. As Brené Brown says, “the most compassionate people have the most well-defined and well-respected boundaries.” This is because when they say yes, they mean it, and when they say no, they mean it. There is no hidden anger or resentment. A yes is an authentic yes. So moving forward, I am going to say no when anyone asks to store something in my garage: it is not theirs to fill up. This will leave me with the space to say yes to the things that I truly want to.
“People often say, ‘Meditation is all very well, but what does it have to do with my life?’ What it has to do with your life is that perhaps through this simple practice of paying attention—giving loving-kindness to your speech and your actions and the movements of your mind—you begin to realize that you’re always standing in the middle of a sacred circle, and that’s your whole life. This room is not the sacred circle. Gampo Abbey is not the sacred circle. Wherever you go for the rest of your life, you’re always in the middle of the universe and the circle is always around you. Everyone who walks up to you has entered that sacred space, and it’s not an accident. Whatever comes into the space is there to teach you.”
Excerpted from:
Awakening Loving-Kindness by Pema Chödrön, page 54
I really enjoyed the Netflix series, The Good Place. It follows the story of four characters who enter the afterlife and undergo a series of adventures together: Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani and Jason. It is funny, silly and smart, providing the perfect combination for a great comedy. Although full of laughs, it also has a deeply reflective undertone, commenting on how hard it is to truly be a “good” human being in our current world, even with the best of intentions.
“Life now is so complicated, it’s impossible for anyone to be good enough for the Good Place,” Michael explains to the Judge (Maya Rudolph), the overseer of the afterlife. “These days, just buying a tomato at a grocery store means that you are unwittingly supporting toxic pesticides, exploiting labor, contributing to global warming. Humans think that they’re making one choice, but they’re actually making dozens of choices they don’t even know they’re making!”
According to Roger Gottlieb, a philosophy professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, these dilemmas are unavoidable in contemporary society: “Morally, we are caught in a system we did not design, faced with unpleasant choices we would rather skip over, torn between wanting a little more ease and a nagging conscience that suggests that such ease is not worth the moral cost, and sometimes compelled to choose what we would think is the least bad of two distressing alternatives.”
Although this is a hard reality to face, the truth is that we just have to keep doing our best: moment by moment, day by day. As Glennon Doyle advises in her book, Love Warrior: “Just do the next right thing, one thing at a time. That’ll take you all the way home.” I cannot tell you much more about this tv series without giving it away. All I can say is that it is definitely worth watching. It will make you laugh, cry and reflect upon the meaning of life; and the ending is one of the best that I have ever seen. Make sure to watch it right to the final episode. You will be happy that you did. Check it out and let me know what you think!
Have you found yourself staying up late, joylessly bingeing TV shows and scrolling through the news, or simply navigating your day uninspired and aimless? Chances are you are languishing, says organizational psychologist Adam Grant. He breaks down the key indicators of languishing and presents three ways to escape that “meh” feeling and start finding your flow.
“Someone once said, ‘Anxiety is excitement without the breath.’ What this means to me is that if I can breathe through the anxiety, I can recognize that it is a friend trying to warn me when it thinks I am in danger.
Unfortunately, it is sometimes the very traumatized friend—lingering anxiety in me, launched by something awful someone said or did—that is emerging at times when there is no immediate threat.
I learned if I could see free-floating anxiety as my traumatized friend who is always with me, I can learn to breathe through the terror I experience so viscerally and transform trepidation into curiosity. We can offer our traumatized friends within both consolation and encouragement using this affirmation:
Thank you, anxiety, for helping me stay alert to the multiple emotional, physical, and spiritual threats in the world. You can relax, as I am breathing through the worry.“
~ Excerpted from: “On Being Lailah’s Daughter” by Kamilah Majied in Black and Buddhist: What Buddhism Can Teach Us about Race, Resilience, Transformation, and Freedom.
September 30th, 2021 marks the first National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. The creation of this day is in response to the 94 calls to action from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It is a new federal statutory holiday in Canada, marking the genocide that took place in our country, as well as the irreparable, intergenerational harm that residential schools continue to afflict upon Indigenous families and communities. It honours the survivors. Residential schools were government-sponsored religious schools specifically established to “kill the Indian in the child” and assimilate Indigenous children into Euro-Canadian culture. They ran for over over a hundred years, from the late 1800s until 1996: impacting over 150,000 children.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission final report estimates that more than 4,000 indigenous children died in residential schools from either neglect or abuse. It is believed that this number is actually five to ten times higher, but the final total is unknown, due to poor record keeping by the churches, and unmarked mass graves.
Throughout the spring and summer of 2021, many new discoveries of children’s bodies were made due to the ground penetrating radar technology. The Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation in British Columbia discovered 215 unmarked graves on the grounds of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School. The Penelakut First Nation located 160 undocumented and unmarked graves in the province’s Southern Gulf Islands, once home to the Kuper Island Residential School; and 750 unmarked graves were discovered on the grounds of the former Marieval Indian Residential School in Saskatchewan.
September 30 is also Orange Shirt Day. This is an Indigenous-led grassroots commemorative day that honours the children who survived Indian Residential Schools and remembers those who did not. This day originates from the experience of Phyllis Webstad, a Northern Secwpemc (Shuswap) from the Stswecem’c Xgat’tem First Nation, on her first day of school, where she arrived dressed in a new orange shirt, and it was taken away from her. It has come to symbolize the stripping away of culture, freedom and self-esteem experienced by Indigenous children over generations. Orange Shirt Day invites Canadians to wear orange shirts on September 30th each year to honour survivors of residential schools, their families, and their communities.
Many Canadians view the residential school system as part of a distant past, disassociated from the current day. This is incorrect. The last residential school did not close its doors until 1996, and many of the leaders, teachers, parents, and grandparents of our Indigenous communities are residential school survivors. Although residential schools are closed, their effects remain ongoing for both survivors and their descendants who now share in the intergenerational effects of trauma and loss of language, culture, traditional teachings, and mental/spiritual wellbeing.
In Canada, 52.2% of children in foster care are Indigenous, but account for only 7.7% of the child population. This means 14,970 out of 28,665 foster children in private homes under the age of 15 are Indigenous: many of them permanently removed from Indigenous communities. Results from the 2011 National Household Survey also show that 38% of Indigenous children in Canada live in poverty, compared to 7% for non-Indigenous children. This stark reality illustrates the ongoing ripple effects of racists government policies, such as the Indian Residential School System, and the Indian Act.
On this first National Day of Truth and Reconciliation, every Canadians must take small, incremental steps on the path towards reconciliation. This can be done in many different ways, through learning, attending events, or donating to your community. It is a personal journey but one that we all need to commit to if we are to successfully move this country towards meaningful reconciliation with Indigenous peoples.
Here are some links that provide ideas for how you can take action today:
Carl Sagan’s book Pale Blue Dot was inspired by an image taken by Voyager 1 on February 14, 1990. As the spacecraft was departing for the fringes of the solar system, it took a final photograph of the earth.
Voyager 1 was about 6.4 billion kilometers (4 billion miles) away, and approximately 32 degrees above the ecliptic plane, when it captured a portrait of our planet. Caught in the centre of scattered light rays (a result of taking the picture so close to the Sun), it appears as a tiny point of light, a crescent only 0.12 pixel in size.
“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbour life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”
“Sobriety is the capacity to savour.” ~ Russ Hudson
In western society, alcohol is a symbol of sophistication, adulthood and relaxation. It represents having fun and letting loose. Consuming alcohol is often the centre point of many social gatherings, especially for young adults. Familiar sayings include: “I deserve a glass of wine” and “I need a drink to unwind.”
Cultural forces fuel consumption. Since the mid-1990s, there’s been a ‘pinking’ of the alcohol market, with skinny cocktails and berry-flavored vodkas. Alcohol is packaged as an essential tool to “surviving” motherhood. Funny memes circulate the internet and wine companies brand their product as “mommy juice.” Women are sold the idea that parenthood is a burden that only alcohol can soothe: it is presented as the ultimate way for a woman to relax and reward herself. As a result, there is a growing number of alcohol dependent women.
“The pace at which most women live is punishing,” says Ann Dowsett Johnston, author of Drink: The Intimate Relationship Between Women and Alcohol. “You race home from a busy day at the office and have emails from work waiting for you and food to prepare and laundry piling up. The easiest thing to do when you’re standing at the cutting board making dinner is pour yourself a glass of wine. It’s the ultimate decompression tool.”
More women are drinking and the amount that they are drinking is increasing. A 2017 study sponsored by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism laid it out in stark terms. From 2001 to 2013, the prevalence of alcohol use among women in the U.S. rose nearly 16 percent. And during the same time frame, the percentage of women who have four or more drinks on a given day, on a weekly basis, rose by 58 percent. “Drinking has a tendency to escalate—one glass turns into two and then three,” says psychologist Joseph Nowinski, PhD, author of Almost Alcoholic. “That doesn’t mean you’re an addict, but you should be aware that you’ve moved from low-risk drinking to a level that’s more dangerous.” A 2017 study in the journal JAMA Psychiatry found that problem drinking, defined as drinking to the point where it interferes with your life or you are unable to stop, jumped by more than 80% among American women between 2002 and 2013.
Women are also more likely than men to experience long-term negative health effects from alcohol use. A study from the University of Oxford found that many serious illnesses and chronic health conditions are linked to drinking, even at low levels. Long-term alcohol use can increase the risk of at least eight types of cancer (mouth, pharynx, larynx, esophagus, liver, breast, colon, rectum) and numerous other serious conditions (e.g. epilepsy, stroke, pancreatitis, dysrythmias, and hypertension).
It is important for women to speak openly to one another about the risks of alcohol consumption. It is easy it is to cross the line into dependency. We need to share our experiences and provide support to one another. Many people rely on some form of substance to ease from the pressures of daily life. Alcohol is readily available and drinking is openly encouraged but it can easily spin out of control: eventually leading to a decline in overall levels of mental and physical health.
In my own life, I have loved more than one alcoholic. I have witnessed first-hand how addiction destroys a person’s health and the ability to connect with others. It is a slow and painful loss. This experience made me mindful of my own relationship with alcohol; and I began to notice how I used it as a crutch when I was feeling particularly sad or stressed. It soothed the immediate pain but it was not the cure. Alcohol is more of a blunt instrument than a finely tuned tool. As Brené Brown says in the Gifts of Imperfection, “We cannot selectively numb emotions, when we numb the painful emotions, we also numb the positive emotions.”
Over the years, I have learned that even the hardest feelings have something to teach me, but in order to receive, I must be willing to surrender: to place my head in the mouth of the lion and trust that I will not die. As a mother, I want to model making healthy choices for my daughter: to teach her that there are better ways of coping with the many pressures of life. I hope that when she witnesses me choosing to take a brave and open-hearted path, it will encourage her to do the same. All of these considerations eventually led me to the decision to give up alcohol and rely on other practices for stress management and relaxation (e.g exercise, meditation, yoga).
At first, it was not easy being one of the only sober people in the room. It runs against the grain of what everyone else is doing and it makes you stand out. I was often asked why I was drinking sparking water instead wine. When I responded that it was a choice for my health and wellbeing, I received a blank stare, or confused expression in return. Many people could not wrap their head around the concept; and some viewed my sobriety as a personal criticism of their choice to drink. Is it not. It is a gift that I am giving to myself. Over the years, this tension has lessened: or maybe I am just not worried about what other people think anymore. The people who initially had the most issue with my decision, faded out of my life, and those that still remain are very supportive. I cherish each opportunity to spend time with the people I love, with a clear head, and wake up in the morning, with no regrets.
“The opposite of addiction is not sobriety but connection.”
There is a growing movement of “sober curious” women seeking to have a different relationship with alcohol and a range of support options available to them. This includes programs and resources that offer assistance with everything from moderating alcohol intake to choosing abstinence. Here are a few that I have come across. I hope that you find them helpful. Let me know if you discover any new ones to highlight.
Club Soda Club helps people live well by being more mindful about drinking. Whether you want to cut down, take a break from alcohol, or stop drinking all together, you are welcome to join them.
Moderation Management (moderation.org)is a free program that starts with 30 days of abstinence and includes a “mutual-help” environment with meetings that you can attend in person or dial into by phone as you work on changing your habits.
Hello Sunday Morning recognizes that you don’t need to have a clinical addiction in order to change your drinking habits. Whether you just want to learn how to limit your drinking, take a break or just better understand alcohol use, Hello Sunday Morning can help.
The Luckiest Club is a web-based, online information-sharing and connection platform which seeks to provide opportunities for like-minded people to find each other and form connections. It facilitates the sharing of information that improves understanding of addiction, sobriety, sober living, and related information.
Tempest provides a mobile, self-directed yet supported method to get and stay sober. The course includes weekly live sessions, weekly recorded lectures, Q&A sessions, daily guided meditations, intention-setting and more.
Reframe a platform that utilizes neuroscience and brings together an evidence-based behaviour change program, with tools, and a supportive community.
Breath by Breath 