Category Archives: 7 sins and friends

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B is for bored

B is for bored? All of the emotions that I could pick that start with B, and I pick bored?

But I am going to talk about bored in the context of chronic pain: and suddenly it is not boring at all.

Welcome to 7 Sins and friends, a spectrum, a kaleidoscope, an ABC of emotions.

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If you hear the same sound over and over, like a faucet dripping, can you tune it out? I can. I can tune out practically any noise and I have fallen asleep under bright light in a Casino room full of ringing and blinging and alarming machines.

You may not have quite that level of ignoring something, but you can certainly tune things out. I have been reading Jon Kabat Zinn’s books on Mindfulness Meditation and I have used his mindfulness CD. I was having trouble sleeping after my father died, and I would use the CD. However, I used it in the reverse of how it is meant.

I used the body scan. Dr. Zinn talks in a slow calm tone and has the listener move from body part to body part, just feeling what is there. Not tightening or releasing muscles, but just starting with the left toes. At the start he says, “This is to fall more awake, not to fall asleep.” And I fell asleep every time.

But what does this have to do with pain? If you have tried meditation and focusing on your breath, your mind wanders. It gets bored. It starts think about the grocery list, or that person who yelled at you or ….. anything but the breath. You keep returning your mind to the breath. One day I had a hurt knee and was trying to go to sleep and thought…. hmmm. So I focused all my attention on the knee pain. Really tried to get inside my knee. Felt the pain fully and entirely….. and soon I was thinking about my grocery list. I pulled my mind back to my knee. My mind was sulky: yes, it hurts some, so what? Can’t we do something else? I am bored!

We are taught that pain is bad and I see many people in clinic who are afraid because of back pain. They are afraid to move because pain means something is wrong. Only most of the time it means that they have injured back muscles. The back muscles cramp up to protect themselves. The muscles must be soothed and stretched and healed and to do that we have to both pay attention to the pain and move without hurting the muscles worse. Sounds a bit boring,  right? Bored is more important than we think….

I took the photograph at the Hoh Rainforest on the Olympic Peninsula Washington, in 2004. We were not bored.

 

 

 

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A is for Avarice

Welcome to 7 Sins and friends, where each letter will be one of the rich diversity of emotions that we experience.

I choose avarice first because two of the sins start with G, so avarice will stand in for greed. The meaning is not the same, but they are related.

Avarice: insatiable greed for riches; inordinate, miserly desire to gain and hoard wealth.

Greed: excessive or rapacious desire, especially for wealth or possessions.

So they are related. Have you felt avaricious or greedy? I am always greedy for books, I love books. I have a fence with a community library now, to try to free more books from my clutches, back to other people, but I still have more books than bookshelves.

atoza

When I was in fourth grade, I won a summer library reading contest. The books were chosen from a list. The newspaper sent a reporter to take a picture. He started piling books on a table in front of me. I objected! He was piling up different books from the ones I’d read! He explained that it didn’t matter, it was just a picture…. I didn’t really approve but I let him take the picture with the wrong books.

Avarice makes me think of our present election and the people running. We seem to admire people who build great wealth for themselves, but don’t we admire those people who do brilliant things for the world and for other people more? What do you think? And what do you feel?

The photo is George White’s father: this George White. This is my mother’s mother’s father’s father. He and his wife raised a Congregationalist missionary, George White,  who witnessed the Armenian genocide in Turkey in the 1910s. My grandmother wept reading the romance Lorna Doone at age 16 as they left Turkey, not knowing that they were fleeing the country.

 

 

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7 Sins and friends

My blogging from A to Z this year is titled 7 sins and friends….. sins? I am thinking about emotions and how many our culture says are bad or that we should not feel. Men are encouraged to be strong and silent and women are encouraged to be nice. “Feel good all the time!” says our culture. But we can’t, won’t, don’t.

People say, “Try not to feel that way.” Now when someone says that to me, I think, that is a feeling that they are not comfortable with, but I am comfortable with it, enough to express it. We label feelings with value judgements. Happy is a good feeling, anger is terrible, but really it is all neurological information. It is part of our system for exploring the world, just as touch and taste and sight and hearing help us explore the world. Imagine if we could not feel fear: a toddler walking off a cliff because they have no idea to be afraid. And without pain, we would not pull our finger back from being burned. If we can’t grieve, we can’t truly love.

I sat down yesterday and made a list of emotions and feelings, from A to Z, and I have more than one for each. I will only choose one for each letter, at least that is the current plan, but think of the richness and complexity of human feeling. Why don’t we celebrate it instead of excoriating it? And doesn’t every human have the full spectrum of feelings? We may not be comfortable with a feeling or have a name for it, but I think we all have all of them.

The photo is from Halloween, 2005, dressed up for church.