Category Archive for Happiness/Mental health

I was touched by Nora Ephron’s “First Annual HuffPost Charity Chain.” Her charity of choice for this year is the Innocence Project. It supports the collection of DNA and other evidence to get innocent people out of jail.

Readers sent in their wonderful projects. I wanted to give to each one. The problem is always who to give to. Over the years I have developed a way to narrow it down. For me the best giving involves not just writing the check, but giving my self and my time.

Here my favorite ways to give time:

Rotary International:  When I was International Chair, my club funded a washing machine for a Russian orphanage (Can you imagine handwashing for 50 children in Siberia?), desks for a Mexican elementary school, and a water project that supplied 1700 families of the poorest of the poor in the Philippines. Maybe even more important, we were in partnership with the Rotarian business people in those local communities. They did all the work and I did my share with a few emails. And now I have friends for life in all three places.

One-on-one for free:  I recently spent a couple of hours tutoring a young friend of a friend. I didn’t teach him algebra as much as I showed him how to learn algebra. Bright, creative, sensitive, he caught on quickly. That little bit of time will effect his life.

I ran into Borders last week to sign some books and met a 50-something woman who has been struggling with what to do next with school and work. In a few minutes of chatting about what we both really want out of life, she shook down a whole new career direction that will help hundreds, maybe thousands, of others. I did nothing but give her the space and a few minutes and she reminded me how much taking a bit of time with a stranger can mean.

I’m “on call” for advice for the Paia Youth and Cultural Center. I cofounded it and I have been around the longest. Now and then I help sort out complicated messes on the phone or over coffee with the staff or board members. They go off and do the real (and wonderful) work.

Systems science:   For almost ten years, I’ve been researching and writing about this emerging worldview. It is the grounding for Men Are Easy. It has the power to shift the world.

So, yes, I’ll write a few checks, but this year I want every bit of my work and my life to be about giving and I’m going to be continually on the lookout for the very best ways to do it.

I keep hearing about the second Oprah show with Elizabeth Gilbert. Women are finding their places of peace in their homes. Women are making pilgrimages to Italy, India, and Indonesia. My friend Nancy wants her hair to be like Elizabeth’s. But Eat Pray Love is not the first about a woman finding her way.

Years ago a friend gave me Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s book, Gift from the Sea. First published in 1955, it is about the importance of taking time for contemplation and creativity within and in spite of marriage and family.

When our children were small, I left them with my over-working husband and moved into our newly-remodeled rental. I had one futon, my grandmother’s quilt, a bed lamp, and one chair that I moved out to the porch. Done with my construction projects by noon, I sat in that chair for hours. I stared at clouds. I slept. I ate cottage cheese, fresh tomatoes, and cucumbers. My only book was Gift from the Sea.

A month later I moved back home, much healthier, rested, clear, ready to take on the new phase of our life.

My actions could be interpreted as selfish. That’s the comment about Eat Pray Love that one mommy blogger had. But for me that month was a survival move. My husband connected more deeply to our children and home. That time healed us both.

I recently read that depression and anxiety are found in higher rates among disadvantaged people. Anne Lindbergh was an aviator, an author, and mother of five, but she had people to clean, cook, and take care of the children. She and I had spare houses and accommodating husbands.

I flash back to my mother, who had five children and no extra house. When I was a teenager, I once noticed that she was washing dishes alone in the dark kitchen.  In a fit of guilt, I asked if she wanted help. She carefully folded the dish towel, placed it on the counter, turned to me, and said, “Lynn, this is the only time that I have time to myself. Leave me alone.”

These days I find asylum in writing, in walking with girlfriends, in just cleaning out a closet. Selfish? Never. It’s all about taking the time in order to give.

In the book Eat Pray Love, Elizabeth is nuts, crying on the bathroom floor for months, leaves her husband–the suburbs and babies just weren’t going to work for her–falls in and out of love on the rebound and then takes off (with a big fat book advance) for a year-long trip to find herself in Italy, India, and Indonesia.

Oprah is fascinated by this woman and the book. Oprah has said over and over again how very important it is to retain your sense of self. And this book is about the complete loss and then discovery of a renewed sense of self.

Oprah thinks that the self is something that you have that needs to be protected. And with a beautiful self like Oprah’s, no wonder! But the self is an illusion. We are creating ourselves as we live. You’re adding, strengthening or pruning neurons as you read this. Put in enough information–and who in this culture isn’t?–and soon you’ll find that the old you is no longer able to efficiently process what’s coming at you. You’ll find that for a while everything’s all wrong because your brain is literally reorganizing. For a while, all is chaos.
Like I say in Men Are Easy:

At some point you will probably find that the life you constructed no longer works. Maybe you can no longer tolerate what you tolerated before. Maybe he’s not changing and you are. Or he’s changing and demanding that you adapt.

In these times, your relationship to love and to others is undergoing intense growth, and transition, in nature and in life, is rarely smooth.

A time of intense growth is not like the bloom of a flower. It can be more like Mount St. Helens, rumbling and growing in pressure until it erupts, obscuring everything known. Eventually life comes back, often more beautiful than before, but the landscape is never the same again.

This is not the territory for sissies.

Our culture tends to think that chaos is breakdown, but, in nature, chaos is the re-ordering to a higher level of efficiency and complexity. Fear makes it all much more difficult to handle. When you’re afraid that you’re crazy and that you are having a breakdown, your brain can’t function properly. The brain fails to process as well.

But when you understand that the chaos is a good thing, that it’s temporary, and that it will result in a higher level of functioning, then you can relax and get curious about it. Once you understand that you’re changing your relationship to all of your relationships, then you can just wait and let it all shake out.
Too bad we all can’t just run off to Italy, India, and Indonesia. But we can all eat, pray, love, and talk and laugh with our friends. I’m just glad that I’ve been able to go through the craziness in relative obscurity. If Oprah’s going to go through it, it will be in a spotlight while running an empire. Geez.

According to a NY Times article and a study on PubMed, women who “self-silence” during arguments significantly increase their risk for heart disease. Men don’t. They can suppress feelings and not suffer health effects at all.

Maybe it’s because men “fight and fly” when stressed. We women “tend and befriend.” We need to talk and bond. When we women feel cut off, we stress out.

Another, more general, explanation may be that closed systems fail to thrive. When living systems are cut off from the free flow of information, matter, and/or energy with their environments, they can’t get the proper feedback to regulate themselves.

The NY Times’ Well blog gives the four signs of bottling up from Dr. Dana Jack’s book Silencing the Self: Women and Depression:
1. I don’t speak my feelings in an intimate relationship when I know they will cause disagreement.
2. Caring means putting the other’s person’s needs in front of my own.
3. Often I look happy enough on the outside, but inwardly I feel angry and rebellious.
4. I often feel responsible for other people’s feelings.

Men simply don’t have these issues. Men are emotionally wired differently. They can’t mix information and information very well. They aren’t quite so sensitive and tuned in. Just read some of the literature on babies and mothers and their intense interactions. Brain development happens in both the mother and infant. Women teach babies how to soothe themselves, to self-soothe. The infant’s social brain develops in interaction with the mother via the more primitive emotional brain. We are all about making peace and putting their needs first.
What do you do when you realize that bottling your feelings up will make you sick but when also know that saying what you feel will make the whole thing worse?

Practice opening up in the face of threat. Note the anger and then get curious. Treat it like martial arts or like walking meditation. Take very good care of yourself first so that you can do this–It’s difficult to get on top of anything when you’re tired and hungry.

My husband and I will get into spats. And I wrote the book. Then, of course, he’ll remind me. It’s infuriating. But behind it all we know we know that we’re okay.

Bottled up feelings are not good. A closed system is always self-destructive. Always. The secret is to learn to open yourself in the face of threat. To see the whole process for what it is–a momentary insanity. If you can’t do it yourself, then do it with a very good therapist. When you get this down, life with men at home and at work is so much easier.

I ran into an artist friend of mine the other day, who reminded me of a very good tip from Alanon:

When you’re losing it, when you snap at someone, or when life seems hopeless,
remember to HALT — Stop and ask, “Am I Hungry, Angry, Lonely, or Tired?

Maybe the problem isn’t your partner or your life. Maybe it’s just time to get those needs met.

I googled HALT and found it in a blog post by a recently widowed mother of twin toddlers. Wow. When wouldn’t she be hungry, angry, lonely, and/or tired? She put it all into perspective. Despite the tragic loss of their father, lucky twins to have her as a mom.