The Lazy Way To Self Awareness

I am using a new little electronic device to keep myself calm. Its like zen in a teeny little charge-able geek machine.

I clip it on my bra when I get dressed and then it acts like a tiny Jiminy Cricket on my shoulder and tells me when I am not breathing enough, when I haven't moved for a while and when I have dipped into a significantly filling period of calm. I love it!

I asked for this for my birthday. I know that I can/could learn to watch myself using my own brain and not a little gadget. BUT until then....as I learn the steps....I have this little counselor made out of plastic, wires and LED lights.  I know that the Spire isn't actually alive in the traditional, scientific sense of the word but I sure feel boosted and partnered with, as though someone else is in this game with me. Maybe its God that I feel...or maybe its the energy in all things that is alive...even if they are just stuff. Maybe I feel myself and am somehow connecting and partnering with capability when I think I'm just using a tool to win at a game.




The great game. The game of becoming (as the author of the Velveteen Rabbit names it) and emerging and growing and bettering. Learning to see what is there (me, having a freaking tense episode because I sat down and tried to do Storytime with my 3 year old?!?!) and mold and work with the crazy truth and reality that we have in ourselves. I am the worst ever at some of this....I love to notice and to introspect but I have a LOT of scripts inside myself about what "should be" that I actually confuse with reality. This is partly the curse of the optimist I think, I know that wishing makes reality and that what we focus on becomes so I try to train my mind on good things....that's all very well. I also tell lies to myself and others about what is really happening because I'm embarrassed, I'm judgmental and I have a neat little script for "how it all should go."

That's getting kind of out there.

All I think I mean to be saying is that wearing this new device is really illuminating as well as comforting. I feel helped and capable when it tells me that I need to take a calm period and offers a guided meditation. I also, am shocked, confused and embarrassed by what calms, focuses and stresses me....and my own inability to ever have noticed my good and bad triggers before.

For Example:

• Individual Time with each boy (a new parenting technique I am trying lately) is a stress trigger for me sometimes. 
• Predictably, scolding children stresses me out....but spousal discussions, even about divisive issues can just rack up as periods of focused energy. 
• Laundry is brain exercise for me....I focus then.
• Art relaxes me and so does coffee....or sitting with a hot drink, I guess. 
• I don't have a lot of stress in my life by volume....or calm....I'm quite low on relaxing, battery charging moments, but I swim in focused energy. I have all kinds of it. 

I am fascinated. I can't wait until I have a week of data....until I watch myself on trips, until I see what I am like in different seasons of the year, until I learn all the things and know how to do it.

“You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in your joints and very shabby." -Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit