May I Have Your Attention Please? This is the Universe Speaking.

Ignoring its previous, more subtle nudges to "slow down," lately the Universe has called out the big dogs in an effort to get my attention.  To wit, I find myself with an injured foot that has left me limping (the second injury to the same foot in six months); the receipt last week of a whopping ticket for driving 23 miles over the speed limit on my way to Bristol, Virginia to visit my parents; the return of my ulcer; and to add insult to injury, the removal of a basal cell carcinoma from my neck a few days ago.  (Not sure how that last is connected to the previous three, but I thought I would throw it in for good measure.)  And then there are the continuing dramas on the work and daughter fronts, respectively.  An unexpected incident in Bristol, however, might have marked a turning point.

For at least a decade, I have been curious about a little store located on Old Abingdon Highway about a mile from my parents' home.  On this recent visit, I finally ventured into Gwen's Herb Shop, which I learned has been in business at that location for 21 years.  There I met Gwen and her daughter, both master herbalists.  The store itself was not the dark and dank health food store, circa 1978, that I expected, but a brightly lit, relatively sparse, and highly organized space stocking only the highest quality herbal and nutritional supplements.  No stranger to the world of herbal and nutritional supplements (I was an early and continuing aficionada and familiar of those aforementioned dark and dank health food co-ops and stores), I immediately plucked a few items off of the shelves, at which point Gwen, a pleasant looking woman about 10 years older than me, approached and asked if I needed assistance.  Although I initially brushed her off, there was something about her energy that made me slow down, actually look at her, and then admit that I was looking for products along the lines of ones I was using already with only partial success, for both sleep and digestive issues.  She asked me if she could do a brief "assessment" to see whether, in fact, I could benefit from the items I had already selected.  The assessment involved asking me some questions, and then engaging in some "exercises" involving my placing one hand on a certain part of my body and then Gwen applying gentle and unobtrusive force and/or pressure to my other hand, which I was to resist.  I should emphasize that she asked permission at all times to touch me and even then, her touch was respectful and unobtrusive.  After about 15 minutes of this exercise, she told me that my insomnia was not related to any underlying sleep disorder, but rather to stress and anxiety.  As a result, the supplements I was already taking (and was about to purchase again) were likely insufficient if not ineffective.   She also told me I had an ulcer, which I suspected had returned but was still in partial denial about.  I would have blown this off had she not pointed to the exact spot where it was diagnosed,about a year ago.  Now, that diagnosis involved numerous doctor and specialist examinations, a CT scan, a colonoscopy, and finally an endoscopy before the physicians involved could identify where the ulcer was located.  In 15 minutes Gwen nailed it.  I left with two bottles of herbal supplements (both, I might add, priced lower than what I had initially selected) which seem to be helping, even after only a week.

While this interesting visit to Gwen's was only the last in a series of incidents reminding me to take things in my life down a few notches, for some reason I left that little shop with a commitment to start managing more effectively the stress in my life.  Unfortunately, I cannot yet retire and I likely have a year or so to go before the mother-daughter complex releases me from its stranglehold, but one thing I can do is resume my meditation practice.  After about 18 months of near-daily practice, for some inexplicable reason, about six months ago I  stopped meditating.  Just stopped one day; there was no gradual sloughing off.  It had begun to seem like one more thing I "had" to fit into my day.  Moreover, I did not seem to be mastering it.  I still spent the vast majority of the 20 minutes I allotted to the practice thinking of how my knee hurt, what I was going to make for dinner, or how often and in what manner my boss had pushed me over edge at work that day.  As a type-A personality, I do not like to engage in activities that I cannot master.  This week, though, as I recommenced my practice, I decided to approach it differently.  That is, I would not expect myself to achieve, in the time allotted, a complete focus on my breath with its concomitant emptying of the mind.  Rather, I would approach it for what it really was:  practice.  Practice, that is, in gently leading my mind, as every 2-3 seconds it raced away from my breath to the ten million distractions that bounced off of the walls of my brain, back to the breath.  To repeat:  the new emphasis would be on the exercise of continually bringing my focus back to the breath, and not on remaining focused on the breath. The latter, I seem to only now be grasping, is an exercise in self-defeating futility, at least for a novice like me.  Having given myself permission not to be "good" at this meditation thing, I am hopeful that I might be able to plumb its depths more effectively.  We'll see.