You Are Doing Enough (it's a Pandemic!)

At this moment, take a breath and see if you can relax your jaw. (I just noticed I was holding my breath too.) Grab some tea, and go easy.

At a time like this one all my clients are going through the same thing I’m going through — a pandemic engulfing the world and devastating entire countries. Everyone is going through it in their own unique way, but we are also in it together. With every hour, the news gets more dire and yet so many things still remain uncertain.

Uncertainty is immensely difficult for all of us to live with, even the regular everyday uncertainty that we each must bear. But uncertainty on a global level, about pretty much every single aspect of our lives that we had come to take for granted — that’s Hard with a capital H. Even — and pardon me for the utterly obvious joke — being able to count on toilet paper is no longer a given. (And I actually was anxious about it for a while!) We know the world is not going to look the same ever again, but we don’t know what that means — and I think we feel similarly freaked out by this.

So, we take to the internet and social media to try to relieve our momentary anxiety. It has been so helpful for myself personally — everyone is posting about the same thing, and the immediacy of the posts helps me feel connected. I’m sure this is why so many people take to it now as well. That, and so many being grounded at home.

Image by mohamed Hassan from Pixabay

I’ve been amazed to see so many articles and links to all the cool free stuff being offered online — courses, museum tours, concerts, and even operas. Every time I see a post like that, my heart warms up a little, feeling the generosity of companies and organizations everywhere. There is indeed so much goodness, and so much knowledge and beauty at our fingertips, there for the taking. However, I also realized that this grateful feeling came with a kind of asterisk — which is why I decided to write this post.

The pandemic — along with the unbearable uncertainty of what may come — has kicked up most of our nervous systems into survival mode even if your immediate survival is not at stake at this moment. Stress chemicals are squirted into your body, and you are constantly working to mitigate anxiety. That’s where social media can be so useful, despite its other flaws. But not everyone is able to simply shift their routines and treat their self-quarantines (or mandated ones, for that matter) as a “break” or an opportunity to learn from this new experience. Even when you are not stuck at home with children or don’t have an abusive situation you can’t escape from, even when you can order your groceries online and aren’t worried about paying your rent, what is happening in the world is stressful and it affects your body and your life. And in a state like this, watching a museum tour or taking in a free opera, might not be possible. When you are stressed, you might be in fight, flight, freeze, or fawn response (or a dizzying blend of all of the above) — and it might not be immediately obvious even to yourself. The effects can be so subtle.

So yes, for many people, this experience can be an incredible learning opportunity, a chance to be mindful, to learn to appreciate the little things, a chance to recognize and withdraw unnecessary attachments (like, do I really need that book I probably won’t get to read for 3 years?), a chance to reconnect, and an opportunity to practice kindness and connection. But for so many, that’s too much — too heavy a burden.

Many people with various traumas (whether big or microscopic-and-cumulative) are going to be too amped up right now, to take in free courses or virtual tours online. When one’s nervous system is amped up like this, relaxation and learning are not possible and cause them to feel more stressed. Many people need more comfort and support now, even if it means watching familiar shows on loop.

So if you’re up for a free online course, a gallery tour or a new movie, by all means — revel in those delicious offerings. But if you are feeling that “asterisk” I have encountered, if you can’t “make the most of” a global pandemic, you have full permission (and please give it to yourself!!) to hold onto what’s always worked for you. Your defenses (i.e. coping mechanisms) are okay to use. (Of course, if they lead you to also hurt yourself, please be kind to you, kinder than ever!)

Social media has always been skewed toward bite-sized, easy advice, positive quotes, attempts to inspire, and jokes/memes. Balancing this out can be hard if it’s all you’re seeing, even when you already know that not all of it is going to be useful. I personally find the humor very healing, but I also have moments when I feel sick to my stomach and reach for easy comforts that have worked before. That’s just fine.

So, my own, bite-sized advice is this:

– Be really, really kind to yourself. If all you can do is put one foot in front of the other, you are doing enough.
– Find ways to create a state of relaxation in your body whenever possible.

If you can take deep, intentional breaths throughout the day, amazing. There are also wonderful guided meditations that can be lovely for this purpose. This doesn’t need to be a time to “learn to meditate”. This is simply to give your body a break, and a chance for the stress chemicals to get filtered out.

This is enough. You are doing enough.

I have compiled a list of resources that can be helpful to help your body relax and release the stress. I am sharing things I’ve used myself and have found helpful (but feel free to explore the myriad others available!):

GUIDED RELAXATION

Guided Body Scan Meditation for Mind & Body Healing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7xGF8F28zo

Mindfulness Meditation in 20 Minutes
https://youtu.be/64ZU2UCQdmQ

SLEEP
Sleep Hypnosis for Calming An Overactive Mind (guided)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuzJffTliSc

Sleep Hypnosis for Floating Relaxation | Calm Your Mind for Deep Sleep
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CydzZTME9wM

Hypnosis for Life Healing Sleep (guided)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLgwD7qczJQ&t=4295s

Lucid Dreaming Music (instrumental)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nk07QtKXDdE&list=FLqUVWkEtOMOocCxhI1zCAdQ&index=17&t=0s

Sleep Talk Down Guided Meditation (Guided)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69o0P7s8GHE

Lucid Dreaming Hypnosis (guided)
https://youtu.be/d5EbEoIDaDY

Sleep Hypnosis for Anxiety Reduction & Reversal (guided)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvOgpzRJxJg&t=56s

GOOD NIGHT Deep REM Cell Rejuventing Sleep Guided
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KzrrgIpHa8

RELAXING, SOOTHING, and HEALING MUSIC

Meditation Music – Increase Creativity
https://youtu.be/mPwn8I3rD7g

Beautiful music (instrumental)
https://youtu.be/CQUGUDc-fZQ

Chakra Healing ~ Spa Music w/ Binaural Beats (instrumental)
https://youtu.be/ARoih8HTPGw

DISSOLVE TOXINS, CLEANSE INFECTIONS | Full Body Cell Level Detox
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jK2hS40pr-g

Rain & Thunder Relaxation ~ 2 Hours High Quality Ambient Sounds
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9Xu6mkacg8

Risking It All With a Paintbrush

I would like to share a personal experience I recently had while painting. Those of you who are not into art, read it for the metaphor. This is about a whole lot more than just painting.

I had been working on a painting over the weekend, to express some strong emotions about the following week. Monday was going to be a challenge for me, and I really wanted to finish the painting before I saw my analyst on Monday afternoon. Monday’s session would mark a kind of anniversary that was extremely painful for me, an anniversary I wished weren’t happening. I don’t usually make time restrictions on myself when I paint – I like to give myself time to feel into the work and let it develop as it will, in its own time. However, this time, the time pressure was part of what I was expressing, which is why the time restriction felt right. (For the sake of privacy, I am not sharing what the anniversary was, or the title of the painting, but I feel that this will not take away from the experience I am sharing.)

I should tell you a little bit about how I paint. I begin when I either have a feeling I want to express, or the beginning of an image comes to mind. Sometimes it’s something as simple as wanting to make a stroke on the canvas in a particular way, with a specific brush or implement, or in a particular color. I paint in the abstract and never know what the finished product will look like. I just know what it doesn’t look like. I choose colors and textures I am drawn to in the moment as I paint, and in a way, “relate” to the canvas and to what’s already on it. It’s entirely based on how it feels. And I keep going, adding and changing things until I feel a shift inside me when I look at the painting. At some point – be it in the space of hours, days, or weeks – eventually something always “clicks” and the painting feels complete. It can be frustrating, because I never know when this shift would happen, but I have learned to enjoy the process and see what develops. Often (but not always), I take progress photos while I work – such as before making major changes. A mid-way photo of the painting I’m describing is to the right. (You can click the image for a larger view.)

The colors I have been most recently drawn to are navy, red, black, and white. Several of my recent paintings have had this color palette, as did this one. As I worked on it, for quite a while I didn’t like how it felt. It felt too similar to my previous paintings. And while even Picasso had a period when he painted in similar tones for some time, the painting just didn’t feel right. And time was pressing. Something needed to shift in the painting to finally express what I was feeling, but it kept feeling too similar – almost too “polite”. Knowing that I would show the painting to my analyst and to other people has somehow kept me constricted. I was afraid to paint something too gruesome, too painful to look at. I was ex pressing painful states, and yet I didn’t want them to be too painful to those who would look at it. It was a struggle. Feeling frustrated and saddened by this, I added more navy-colored downward “tears” to the canvas, in the hopes of making the shift I needed. It felt a little better, but still not quite right.

Suddenly, I noticed that I actually felt a similar kind of pressure that I often feel in the last 10 minutes of a session with my analyst. It is the urge to be authentic and express what really matters before my time is up and I have to get up and leave. As the morning inched toward the afternoon and I had less and less time remaining until this self-imposed deadline, I felt the urge to “put it all out there” without beating around the bush. Not knowing how to make the painting make the needed shift, I took a thick, coarse, dry brush, and began to make diagonal swipes across those navy “tears”. It felt like an enormous, desperate risk. I felt like I might deface the entire painting and possibly ruin the work of many, many hours. However, the internal pressure was too great, and the dissatisfaction with the previously too-familiar and too-polite painting was just too painful. I decided that I would rather ruin the painting than settle for something that felt wrong. I had both nothing and everything to lose. It’s only paint on a canvas, but sometimes the feeling really is this intense.

I began to make these diagonal strokes across the entire painting. It was both frightening and liberating. For a few moments, and in the safety of an 18” x 24” space, I was literally letting it all be out there. I wasn’t being “polite”. I wasn’t worried about overwhelming someone with my intensity. I just let my feeling go forth. So you won’t be surprised to learn that with such authentic expression, the painting transformed into what finally felt real. I let out an intense gasp when I suddenly saw the entire painting differently. My “click” finally happened. The texture changed, as did the depth and dimension of the entire work. It almost felt like it grew up from a more childlike, repetitive, familiarly-restricted feeling to a more mature, more authentic expression.

I am hopeful that the metaphor is self-evident, but for the sake of completeness I will re-state it. The familiarly-restricted, “polite” painting was like being familiarly inhibited and polite with another person, holding back my truth in fear of being too much, causing pain, and being too aggressive in my self-expression. Making those diagonal strokes felt like a risk, it went against all of the above – both literally and metaphorically. Under the pressure of time – the awareness of which was painfully present for me – I wanted to be as authentic as possible. While this was a special moment for me – a breakthrough – the insight is (ironically) quite timeless: risking it all and putting myself out there was so much more worthwhile than hiding behind a familiarly inhibited way of being.

(If you would like to see more of my art, please visit my Artwork page — I have recently updated it with more of my pieces.)

Permission to Sound Crummy

I am deep in the process of preparing to see clients (under supervision) through my psychoanalytic institute, and I think about it every day a great deal. But it’s not the only thing I do every day, of course. And it’s a good thing too, because recently I made a discovery very relevant to the practice of psychoanalysis while doing something that’s completely different from it: singing.

I have mentioned in earlier posts that I am a classical soprano. However, I have never been professionally trained and have instead sung simply because I enjoyed it. I have taken some lessons off and on, but it was never for very long – with each occasional lesson I would get just enough of what I needed, and then continue singing for my heart’s content and for no other reason.

Recently, however, I have been preparing for a number of performances – some small and one fairly large – though none of them professional. I have been preparing about five songs in total, which is quite a few for me to be working on at once. Being an amateur, I used to simply sing through the songs I was working on at any given time maybe once or twice every couple of days until the next rehearsal with my pianist. In the past, when I prepared only one or two songs at a time, my rehearsals at home lasted maybe 10 minutes in total. I sang while it felt good, and stopped when it stopped feeling good – and pretty much didn’t give it a second thought. But recently, as I’ve been preparing several pieces for my upcoming performances, I discovered something that any professional singer can tell you and could have told me – that I don’t sound all that good in those first 10 minutes. And I realized that the reason singing stopped feeling good during my rehearsals at home in the past was because I didn’t sound all that good, and because I unconsciously judged myself for it.

The rest of this entry is now part of my Kindle ebook, titled “Learning Psychoanalysis: Explorations of a Psychoanalytic Candidate” and can be found here: https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B08X3TNH83

The Fear of Boundless Pleasure

This weekend I decided to pick up one of the canvases I had and paint something. I was inspired by a Facebook friend of mine, whom, incidentally, I’ve never actually met and have no idea how we know each other. Still, he posted a photograph of a painting of his online and we discussed it in some detail because I was really moved by it. The painting was quite large – 40” x 44”. The size of it – or rather, the idea of its size, since photos on Facebook are no larger than half of a computer monitor – was both intimidating and exhilarating. A few days later I found myself longing to make a trip to the art store to get myself a larger canvas. The largest paintings I’d done so far were 6”x6” hamsa drawings – beautiful but at the same time very contained. Inspired by my friend’s abstract art, the wish to give myself free reign with my paints was too big to ignore.

In an earlier entry I reflected on the fear of taking up space, wasting space, using up materials, and other manifestations of, essentially, not allowing myself to fully be who I am and fully express myself. In that entry I wrote about overcoming that fear when staring down a tiny 2”x2” square canvas. I’m not the greatest artist, but what I created satisfied something very deep inside me. The texture of the canvas, the fact that the surface was 3-dimensional, and the fact that no one would punish me even if I’d wound up messing up, really affected me. It was as if I created a new pathway in my body-mind along which impulses had never traveled before, but once it was created, I couldn’t forget it. I look at that tiny painting every day and remember this not-at-all-tiny experience.

The rest of this entry is now part of my Kindle ebook, titled “Learning Psychoanalysis: Explorations of a Psychoanalytic Candidate” and can be found here: https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B08X3TNH83

Taking Up Space

When I was at an art supply store the other day, I saw these tiny canvases for sale. They were literally a 3-inch square, and they cost all of $2 each. I thought they were really cute and totally non-threatening, as opposed to getting a big, “real” canvas to paint on. I don’t think of myself as an Artist with a capital “A” – I draw to express myself, more like visual journaling, rather than to “make art”. I usually only show my works to one or two other people, and only those who really know me. But the tiny canvases, literally called “Itty Canvas” seemed innocent enough. I even

Blank Itty Canvas

bought two of them. (I didn’t, however, buy the itty easel that came with them – that would have been too much. Maybe if Tinker Bell comes over to paint, she could use one of those easels, but not me.)

But at home, those canvases suddenly felt really big.

The rest of this entry is now part of my Kindle ebook, titled “Learning Psychoanalysis: Explorations of a Psychoanalytic Candidate” and can be found here: https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B08X3TNH83