So how about today? Have you practiced any pauses? 

I have a theory (also hear: opinion) that I’m gonna throw out there. Those who struggle the most with the pause, aka “slow down,” are maybe in three different categories:

1.     Those who are high achievers and/or high expecters. There is simply no time for slowing down because things just need to get done and if not, someone or something will be let down.

2.     Those who are most uncomfortable with themselves. It’s tough to sit in the quiet and in the slow with yourself when you either don’t know yourself well or you don’t like yourself much. 

3.     Those who simply don’t know how to. Perhaps they have never intentionally tried it or they have but it was too hard or maybe there is a shame-message that prevents them from authentically engaging in it.

The Amber of “BC” (before cancer) was all three. I never sat by myself in the quiet. I had too many people to please and I had too many responsibilities to answer for and I had too many expectations to meet (many of them being my own) and I had a narrative that simply required myself to measure up. [Enter shame messaging here.] And in living like this, I found that while I could seriously crank out some excellent work and I was certainly an excellent “worker,” I didn’t actually know myself all that well. Nor did I actually have very high confidence seeing as I kept striving for the wrong motivations. And because of these things, I wasn’t actually my best self. 

On the outside I was put together…on the inside, I was not.

The Amber now…well, she’s learning a lot. I still have high standards. I still care about work ethic and excellence. I still care about how people experience me because I don’t agree with an “F-IT attitude,” but I’ll tell ya, I am learning MUCH about priorities (and the importance of them), about capacity (and the limitations of it), about where my time and energy should go first (because one lends directly to the other)…and I’m learning A LOT about who I am and who I want to be. 

And all of these things are learned best in the quiet and the slow down. 

Okay, so Amber of Now…put your money where your mouth is…how do YOU practice the pause?

Well, sometimes I’m not so good at it. But when I practice it:

I take a deep breath, counting to 5 as I breathe in through my nose and counting to 5 as I breathe out through my mouth. And I do that 5 times. That’s less than a minute and can be done literally anywhere and while I’m counting, I’m not letting my mind spin on anything…I simply focus on the numbers.

Conversely, sometimes I just sit there and set a timer for 5 minutes (or if I’m driving, I pick an upcoming landmark on my route) and let my mind spin and wander to wherever it goes being VERY intentional about NO SHAME MESSAGES of, ‘you shouldn’t…,’ ‘you better do…,’ ‘why haven’t you…,’ ‘stop feeling that way…,’ ‘why did you do that?…,’ etc. 

I sit and tune in. First – I can either sit where I am or I can modify my environment however I want (change the direction I’m sitting to change what I’m looking at, move to outside, go to a different part of the house…). Second, no matter where I am, I tune into what I can see, taking note of the details no matter if it’s something I see all of the time or if it’s something I’ve never focused on before. I stretch my vocabulary and find the less common descriptive words while seeing what I’m seeing. Then I close my eyes and listen. Doing the same practice of noting what I hear and stretching my vocabulary to describe the experience. It is here, too, that I pray. If I smell something, I note it and since smells often connect to memories, I note the memory that goes with it. What am I feeling in this quiet slow down? I do a body scan from the top of my head to my toes and back. What is my body feeling both with the nervous system and with the emotional system. And once again, stretching my vocabulary, I’ll note my sense of ‘feel.’ And this one is hard because it’s easy to get bored or start to feel rushed…but I push against that and remain tuned in. Or, I’ll do a sense at a time between the life that needs attention.

The point…it can be scheduled time and it can be in the midst of the overwhelm. It can take an hour or it can take 5 minutes. It simply requires purpose and pause.

What about you? What is your practice?

*Post 897 (PC: Haleigh Havekost)

Gratitude is Messy :: 9/18/17 :: Post 18

We’ve got some big appointments ahead of us this week…appointments that are going to bring some clarity to the fog that is so dense that I cannot see the step next. While I am grateful these days are finally upon us (as the waiting has been tortuously difficult), I am anxious about the realities that are inevitable. I am grateful for answers. Scared of what they will be. 

That’s been something that has come up a lot today – gratitude for the hard stuff.

My kid just came in here and said she was sad…the tears fell. She said she didn’t know where or what but that she was just sad. She couldn’t quantify or qualify her tears. I told her I was proud of her. I told her I was grateful to see her emotion even though it is shattering me inside that some of that emotion is coming from the place of our current situation…how cancer is now written into her story. How she watches her father get overwhelmed. How she watches her mother in pain and serves her dinner and sees her cry….a lot. Yet I find myself grateful this is written in her story so that she can learn that emotional intelligence and healthy expression of emotion is a part of life…because she has a lot of life left to live and a lot of story still to be written. And while I do not want hardship in her life…………. Well, then she wouldn’t have richness and depth to her soul. 

Gratitude for her sadness, gratitude for her future hardships, gratitude for her story.

I finally meet my oncologist tomorrow. I didn’t have much to go on in choosing her. 3 weeks ago in between two surgeon appointments I was at another appointment and given this: “Well, you have two main medical oncologists to choose from…one specializes in only breast cancer, is very wise, he’s a good ole’ cowboy who wears cowboy boots and a cowboy hat to work and has a super dry sense of humor or we have another one, she focuses her work on two main cancers and about 85% is breast cancer; she is a sweet and kind woman…one of those women that will give you a hug if she senses you just need a hug.” I literally said (while crying because I have to choose two surgeons and an oncologist because I have cancer), “I think I’m gonna need a lot of hugs along the way, so I’ll go with the lady that will hug me.” Yes. That is how I chose her. That is how I chose a doctor who has my life in her hands… Call me foolish, I don’t care. I am gonna need some hugs. So tomorrow, I get to meet her for the first time. She will have all of my pathology reports, all of my genetic results, all of my everything and she will be the one to map out the plan ahead. She will tell me what chemo I need, how much I’ll need, what typical side effects it will have…she will be a huge part of building a context around the unknowns and uncertainties ahead. I talked with another medical professional today that works directly with this doctor and absolutely loves her and said I am in such good hands with her. Gratitude. Gratitude for getting a timeline of when I’ll lose my hair. Gratitude of what work will likely look like throughout this next phase. Gratitude of getting answers to how long radiation might be. Gratitude for being able to see a little bit more into the distance and see just a small small vision of the end. 

Gratitude for getting the most difficult answers, to date, in my life.

I got to spend time with a couple of friends today. One came by this morning and spent a few hours with me. One talked with me on the phone tonight. We talked about life. About the hard stuff. About exhaustion. About waning capacity for it all. About needing relief. We all have our stuff. We all walk with others who have their stuff. We talked about anger and sadness and confusion and trying to figure out our understanding of God in the midst of all of this. Oh how grateful I am for their precious time. For their waning capacity to have just enough left to be with me in this mess. For their relationship and their willingness to sit in it with me. 

Gratitude for the exhaustion because it creates a depth that can only come from sitting in the dark with someone in the dark. 

My sweet husband opened up to me tonight, while emptying my drains, that he is overwhelmed today by all of this. That he is tired. That he is frustrated and at his wits end. That he is tired of having a kid who isn’t feeling better and just wants her well. That he is tired of holding it all together. That he is tired of not being well himself and his heart’s desire is that everyone in this house would be well. From head to toe and from inside to out. I know babe. Me too. I am so thankful he shared with me. That he didn’t keep that from me. That he didn’t put on a mask that isn’t real. Gratitude for his authenticity and his willingness to bring me into it even though this cancer is the main source of it. 

Gratitude for his frustration because it opens him up and it creates strength and trust in our marriage as we battle for my…………no, OUR lives.

I got my genetic results today. All negative. This [cancer] is not from anything hereditary or from any sort of gene mutation. Rather this cancer was random. Something perhaps environmentally when I was born or where I grew up…something perhaps from diet or lifestyle or stress….something not predictable or formulaic. I am grateful – and I mean GRATEFUL – that there is nothing in my genes that show I have passed down to my three daughters an increased risk for cancer. I am grateful – and I mean GRATEFUL – that I did not have to sit them down tonight and tell them that they could elect to have mastectomies or hysterectomies at 18 years old to prevent cancer in the future or that they had to be careful when (and if) they decide to one day have a family. Yet…I have no answers of my own of where my cancer came from. There is nothing I can blame. There is nothing concrete I can wrap my head around to make sense of this horrendous chapter in my life. (Quick sidebar: I do not hold true to a theology that says “God gave me cancer to grow my faith”…nope. My body is a broken body that lives in a sinful world and it is what it is but God will USE this as He wastes nothing). Anyways, this genetic result also has thrown me into a bit of a tailspin because if there were a gene mutation that showed me for a higher risk for cancer in the future, then I could have elected to have those organs removed to prevent future cancer. But now…….since it was negative……..I will live in the unknown. Just as I have when this freight train blew through my body. I’m 37 with breast cancer. I have a lot of life left to live. I also have a lot of organs inside of me that could get cancer in them….. If this storm is the hardest of my life so far, what’s to come? I don’t want to be back here. Ever. So gratitude in this looks a little different….. I guess it’s gratitude with uncertainty and while I’m on this road there have been many little moments of God’s orchestration and grace. And that is a constant I can trust for whatever storm comes in the future. 

Gratitude for the reminder that God is in the storm(s). Always.

It is such an odd tension to be grateful for the hard stuff…for the stuff that I am hating with every fiber of my being. And oh how I am anxious for tomorrow. Grateful it is here. Hating the answers that will come. But grateful they will come.

Oh what a mess this is….

I’m Uncertain How to Feel :: 9/18/18 :: Post 369

I’m uncertain how to feel. 

I feel like I’ve walked a similar road – “surgery is necessary for your long-term health and well-being.” My mastectomy was not optional. This now, isn’t either. My mastectomy required real-time pathology to determine what exactly to remove surgically. This will, too. Final comprehensive pathology came a week after my mastectomy detailing invasive cancer that would require extensive aggressive treatment. This, too, will require comprehensive pathology to determine what we are dealing with. Feeling desperate to remove the sickness by mastectomy but deeply devastated at the losses that came with it. Knowing a very similar experience is very possible with this, too. 

The familiarity is hard to accept. And while I’ve learned so much about managing this place, the unknown is just as difficult to sit in. 

Leaving work today was so hard. I’m so tired of my routine being un-routine… trying to leave a big job in the midst of constant un-done, trying to leave it well so others can pick it up smoothly, trusting several others to do my job, knowing the work keeps going and I’ll have to, yet again, find my way back in……

Ugh. 

The uncertainty of selling an older home. Sitting in apprehension as we wait for the next step. Wondering what the Lord is doing. Wondering why some things can’t just be simple and smooth. 

Knowing the “pause button” on life doesn’t exist. Living a busy wife/mom life while battling a disease that a friend of mine so appropriately called the biggest villain on earth. Living only 5 minutes of a time. Watching the wear and tear of this past year and a half on the faces of my husband, daughters, mom and dad….

I’m uncertain how to feel. And I’m exhausted. But by God’s grace I’m resilient. 

And…..Still….. :: 9/18/19 :: Post 733

Thankful for the life-change I am in as it is giving me the capacity to do long days. I didn’t ever really consider that coaching would be an extension of my work day…

By the time I get home, I’m zapped. 

But what I have to remember is that, while it feels very similar to my life from the last many years, what is different is that I am working full time and coaching 5-6 days a week with STILL enough capacity to stay awake to talk with the girls before bed. 

This is exactly what I was hoping for.