All Aboard the Stress Express

I have been away from the blog world for longer than usual this last week and that is not very conducive to fulfilling my goal of actively blogging this year. My apologies--both to myself and to all the people kind enough to take a sec and read my stuff over here in the corner. It has been quite a busy week. Between scrambling to leave my old job in some semblance of order for the next poor schmuck and doing some intense over-analyzing of our wedding registry items, not to mention beginning our "wedding invitation creation" process, it has been a full week indeed.

I don't really know what is going to happen in the next six to eight months or so, and I am half happy and half terrified about it. I mean, I am finally leaving the job that has always sort of just been a gig I have to do for money, and going forth into unknown territory. What if I love the new job? Or hate it? Or feel overworked? Or can't keep up? Or what if it ends up being a great place for me? This could be a huge change to my daily life as I know it, and also my career (or lack thereof) as I know it.

And on another note entirely--I chose to have a destination wedding, come what may, because it really does not require a lot of detailed planning. I pretty much won't have a solid sense of what we will do until a few weeks before, possibly even a few days before. I did this for many reasons, one of which was to relieve myself of the stress of planning. But I find that there is a whole new beast clawing at my brain now--the stress of not planning! It's crazy, I know. But somehow, the unknown details are causing stress in their own weird way. Maybe brides-to-be are just programmed to have some sort of anxiety about the whole occasion no matter what they decide to do. Or maybe I am just a spaz. All perfectly good explanations for the stress I feel sometimes.

So anyway things are tense and busy and will be for the next six to eight months and I have no idea what will occur and what will be good and what will go wrong and here I go diving in head first. (But in an actual true- to-life metaphor, I never learned to dive as a child, so I typically end up doing a half belly-flop with my nose plugged. How about that for self-realization?)

So amidst all these changes and stresses and fun and terror, something really wacky happened two nights ago. I know talking about dreams is pointless and all, but here you go anyway:

At 3:30am, I was deep asleep. In my dream, a film crew was making a movie about my mother when she was 30 years old. They were filming my actual mother at her age now (which is somewhere in the realm of retirement age) and going in and photo-shopping her face so that she appeared as she was at 30. She was wandering around a Theatre lobby with a sweet, innocent look on her face, and I knew (like you do in dreams) that she was waiting for some man she liked who was in charge of said Theatre. There were also a few picture frames with shots of my mother set up all around the place with actual pictures I have seen in my home growing up. I was watching it all like a movie, but was somehow part of it too (as is common in dreams). At one point, I was so moved by the scene and my mother's youthful beauty that I started crying. Heaving, shuddering, convulsive sobs came over my body like a thunderstorm of emotion, and I suddenly became aware of myself, aware of my body lying in my very real bed, starting to quietly shake. The shaking turned into that sort of spasm that crying does to you--your stomach clenches and your head thrusts forward like a pigeon's. That was me. In bed. Now sort of awake and crying uncontrollably.

My fiance shook me until I was fully conscious and asked if I was okay. I could barely speak, I just continued to cry and cry the way dumped girls do once they have a bottle of wine to their dome. It was so strange. I mean, when you dream of peeing, your body (well, most people's bodies, anyway) does not actually pee. Or when you yell at someone in your dream, usually people don't yell out loud in the bedroom. That is the beauty of the body while dreaming. You think you are doing all these things but actually your body is on idle mode and nothing is usually happening but REM. So to have been woken up by my body reacting to the emotional response I had in my dream--well it was so unnatural and downright freaky! And I could not stop crying once I got going. I did not even know what I was crying about and all I could do was let it take its course until it passed, which took some time. Eventually I was able to sleep again. But I was definitely unnerved by the whole experience.

Thinking back about it, I realize that I have been playing it as cool as I can with all the things I have going on, and making efforts not to dwell on or think too much about any of it because of my tendency to fret and worry too much about things out of my control. I guess in doing that, I must have been shoving some emotional responses deep down in that gut of mine for safe keeping. Well people, turns out that shit will manifest itself somehow in another way. The energy will be released.

As a wise character named Dr. Ian Malcolm once said in what might be the greatest film of my generation, "I'm simply saying that life, uh...finds a way."

Meditation on Massage

I have tried to meditate numerous times in my life.

There was the time when I got inspired by my voice and movement classes for theatre majors in college and started trying to re-create the guided meditations I loved so much during class. The problem was, once it was just my own inner voice guiding me, that inner voice liked to fall asleep instead of take me to my special cloud or whatever.

Then there was the time a few years later when I was going through what I like to refer to as my "Blue Period" after college. In a panic to find some happy place inside me while living in LA and working for a gutless celebrity gossip TV network, I thought meditation might get me through this rough patch. Maybe I would even find out what the next step should be on this bumpy little life path of mine. I would go to the closest beach and sit for hours, willing myself to be one with the earth and the sand crabs and the waves crashing in my ears. Picturing myself inside a tiny conch shell and breathing deep did nothing to send me to the deep recesses of myself.

Then I entered massage school, the epitomy of "New Age-y" and I was once again being guided through meditations almost weekly. And even though I seemed to still have a knack for passing out halfway through the Chakras, I came out of class feeling clear and relaxed and sure that meditation was the key to my personal well being. So I tried once again to bring myself there alone at home, picturing the red balloon attached to my coccyx at the root Chakra and hoping it expanded like my instructor had told me it would.

Nothing.

I tried a podcast of "meditation for beginners" made by some hot-sounding Australian man. His voice did little but turn me on and make me want to unleash my inner self in a different way. I do remember that one of the sessions from the Aussie had me staring at a candle flame and I did manage to feel affected and started tearing up. But that could have been because my eyes were burning from staring at a damn flame for so long. I think I saw the residual dot of light in my field of vision for the next 3 days.

I still have hopes that I will learn transcendental meditation David Lynch style, but I am not even close to ready for that at the rate I am going.

So imagine my surprise when it dawned on me recently that sometimes during massage sessions, I go somewhere far away in my brain and find a calm, peaceful inner space that allows me to quiet all the noise and just be. The repetition of the motions, the rocking of my body as I dance around a client and try to keep my hands attune to their body and what it tells me it needs...all this seems to encourage my mind to open up and expand and flow with ideas and feelings and higher realizations galore. It is magical, really. I wonder if perhaps I have found a small window to the world of meditation I have been trying to find for so long.

All I know is that I can go through a million thoughts and ideas during a massage and come out of it feeling a peace I rarely get a chance to experience after staring at a dumb candle flame.

Perhaps it has become my version of meditation. And maybe we can all find each of our own versions of meditation. You may like to rock in your bed and bang your head against the wall to come to a place of peace. He may find that listening to the hum of a washer/dryer soothes him enough to quiet the voice of the world around him. Maybe it is a particular piece of music. Or staring at the most beautiful piece of art you have ever laid eyes on. Or you could be lucky enough to be able to guide yourself through a meditation that brings you to that special cloud.

What is your thing? Do you even realize it brings you there? If you aren't sure, keep searching for it. Maybe it will fall into your lap unexpectedly like mine did.