Shifts | Erica Staab

Archive for the ‘Shifts’ Category

Pain and tender light…

Posted in Grief, Shifts, Uncategorized on September 25, 2011| 4 Comments »

Yesterday I woke up to a call from a friend who was in the midst of deep emotional pain. It was the ending of a relationship, a packing of their life shared into little boxes. And to no ones surprise she was reminded that life doesn’t fit so neatly into boxes. There is the unexpected running into momentos, pictures, moments that they had shared, milestones that were celebrated, and now the untangling. The unraveling of lives that had been woven together for the better part of a decade. Loss, grief and pain were consuming her and darkening her field of vision.

An hour later I was in the salon waiting for my first client. And as he rose with difficulty his eyes met mine, only they weren’t the same eyes I had looked into the last time I saw him. This time his eyes were clouded, full of fear and pain.

As he walked slowly, gingerly back to the massage table he was sharing about his back pain. The fear of the next spasm- the pain that would bring him to his knees, the unpredictability of it, the intensity of it and how his life in the past two weeks had been closed down, reduced to the bare essentials- his life darkened by pain.

Pain- emotional, physical, both bound by it, both deep in the middle of it… both scared of the spasms… both afraid of what comes next… what unsuspecting move or discovery would bring back the blinding pain.

For both the same remedy… touching the tender places, touching gently at first, finding the edge of the pain, finding the borders and the cause, re-introducing the body and the heart to touch that won’t cause pain, breathing in and out, finding safety for sore muscles, for broken hearts.

Both left in different places… both remembering that they are more than their pain, that there was life before, there will be life after- but for now life requires gentleness, modifications of various sorts. Both require lots of rest and water, getting rid of the toxins, clearing out the residue of fear, and learning to trust again.

Trusting the body, trusting the heart, trusting the healing.

And again it comes back a simple recipe for healing…

Breathe

Listen to the pain

Attend with gentleness

Find safety for the hurting places

Trust in the process

Seek out comfort

Look for the healing

Once the pain has opened up the way for the new beginning look to the path stepping one foot in front of another.

Keep breathing.

Pain is the one thing that we spend so much of our time avoiding, keeping the house at just the right temperature, keeping ourselves away from any element that might create mess in any form. Yet, the best of life happens in the mess. Often the moments of greatest stretching and growth happen in the moment of tension between our comfort zone and the beginning of pain. Sometimes these moments are ones we consciously invite, and sometimes they are moments that are forced upon us.

Either way we still choose how we respond to pain. Do we breathe into it, or as Brene Brown talks about “lean into the discomfort.” Or do we constrict our lives, allowing fear to have us focus only the darkness.

It is my hope that you put your faith in the crack of light, that little shaft that breaks through to show us the way back to the light in our life. My hope that you would trust in healing, trust that as John O’Donohue reminds us “You are more than your pain.”

“Even though life may have moved wearily and painfully through such a person, they have still managed not to let it corrode their soul. In such a face a lovely luminosity shines out into the world. It casts a tender light that radiates a sense of wholeness and wholesomeness.”

― John O’Donohue,

Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom

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Bittersweet and sacred…

Posted in Grief, Shifts on September 16, 2011| 8 Comments »

Annabelle and "Dotda" on her first day of school

So this will be the first time in this place that I talk about my brother.

August and September are hard months now… they have been for the past four years.

Four years ago at 6am August 7, 2007 my parents called me to say that I had to come home to Minnesota, that Mitch had been in an accident and he wouldn’t be coming home. On September 15, 2007 his daughter Annabelle was born.

Every year is different with grief, each year it is something different that hits you. For me the first year was pure shock, the first year was devoted to the all-consuming grief, as Joan Didion so aptly puts it “The Year of Magical Thinking”. Then the second year it sinks in and life finds it’s way in the cracks and for brief moments I found myself smiling again, making plans for the future again, enjoying bits and pieces of my life, then it feels like from the third year on it is a random hit or miss thing. Things that used to bother me don’t, and the things I never thought would do… it makes it difficult to predict, and if you can’t predict you can’t control, which for someone who is learning to make peace with the fact that I liked to completely control my life makes me feel out of control and easily overwhelmed.

This translates into exhaustion and desperately wanting off the roller coaster ride of grief. And quite simply to be done, after all it has been four years, the tears have been cried, the milestones have been lived through, isn’t that enough. There are moments that it is too tiring and I am desperate to be completely healed, or just simply break… but instead I find myself in this middle place, in my own In-Between (and not the irony isn’t lost on me)… realizing how far I have come, but also being reminded how tender my heart still is. Sometimes surprised by how quickly the tears can come, and sometimes even more surprised by how they didn’t or won’t.

I didn’t have my words for the past few weeks… and they are coming frustratingly slowly, and haltingly, and for those who know me well know that means I am irritable, frustrated, quiet and crabby. Words are how I make sense of the world, and instead I was brought back to that place of numbness, of not engaging, of doing everything but sitting in front of the blank page to figure out what threads were begin tugged, what buttons were being pushed and what parts of my heart needed to be held more gently.

And then here it was, in the mail, my authors copy of my book, what I have been waiting for. And with it are a million to do’s, blogs to write, posters to make, book signing parties to plan, people to tell, e-mails to send, stories to share, high fives to be given, moments to be celebrated and yet… this moment I have waited so long for I felt this shadow, this weight, this otherness…

And here it was on the calendar, all these dates, milestones and reminders that Mitch isn’t here to celebrate with us.

And that is the piece about grief, the bittersweet part… life continues on… even after the loss.

Light finds it’s way into the corners of your heart and you begin to feel again a little at a time.

But yet, there is that place in me, in my body, in my heart that remembers, that knows even before I do what day it is.

To have it be so near to 9/11 where for the United States there is a collective grief, to have so many reminders of loss on Facebook pages, the television, the blogs, everyone asking “where were you?”. It makes it harder to avoid and simultaneously reminds me how true the words that I scrawled on a napkin after reading the quote somewhere “Grief is universal, grieving is individual.”

And the other day I finally started my words:

Annabelle started preschool

I went, Mitch didn’t.

The book is here.

Mitch isn’t.

But yet it wouldn’t be without grief breaking me open.

So bittersweet..

All of it.

Not one without the other, all intertwined, grief and growth, love and loss, moving forward and remembering backward…

Sigh.

This crazy, beautiful, sad, amazing, breathtaking, wonderful life.

And this time I fought less, and listened more to the grief, I surrendered more quickly and remembered that sometimes I just have to stop.

Grief has reminded me:

To listen.

To pay attention.

To hold myself more gently.

To know that four years later, it will still hurt, and there will be moments.

To know that sometimes I won’t have words, but to trust that the words will always come.

To know that I am surrounded by people who find their way to my side at just the right times.

Mitch and I

From my old blog on Feb. 16th of 2011, and it applies today.

So interesting how often when the loss washes over me in the very next breath I am held in love, and all of the blessings, all of the healing, all the love and the light that has been shared with me envelops me… such a sacred place.

Bittersweet and sacred.

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Stretching…

Posted in Questions, Shifts on September 8, 2011| 3 Comments »

Sound when stretched is music,
Movement when stretched is dance.
Mind when stretched is meditation.
Life when stretched is celebration.

Shri Ravishankar Jee

Life stretched beyond it’s current dimensions never returns to the same shape.

We stretch, we grow, sometimes by our own choice, sometimes by choices that are made for us. Regardless we are pushed, pulled and molded by life as we live it.

So if change is going to happen, if stretching is inevitable, then perhaps we should be more proactive to inviting it in, to taking a first step in guiding the dimensions we want to be stretched in.

Perhaps we have more control in our stretching than we had originally thought, perhaps we have more say in which ways we want to grow than we previously have ever admitted to ourselves. So does life happen to us, or do we conspire with it?

Two different ways of looking at things, but incredibly different places to come from… a place of power and a sense of an internal locus of control, or a victim mentality always caught off guard and too busy responding to things, too tired to create opportunity in your life.

More often than not over the past few years I have become very conscious of which place I am coming from. Recently I was struggling with a situation and nothing felt right in how I was responding. And after talking to a trusted friend, I realized that it was a function of me giving away my power, me not taking responsibility for where I was being stretched, or taking any responsibility for where I wanted to go with it. I was frustrated because someone else wasn’t responding how I wanted them to (misguided expectations which weren’t clearly communicated by me in the first place). So I clearly communicated my needs, released my expectations, but more importantly realized that I could either lean into this growth or continue to be pulled and stretched (the pain compounded by my resistance) and ultimately the actual outcome was the same, and it wasn’t in my control. But I was in control of me.

The exciting thing was that it was so immediate. Because I have been looking at my patterns and responses it was so very clear, when the stakes weren’t high that I was giving away my power. Ultimately in the scheme of things it was a little hiccup barely worth noticing on the emotional landscape of my life… but worth celebrating because I now see it so much more clearly. I am so much more aware of where my power, where my joy, where my peace comes from, what it looks like for me and how to create it. I know where to go when I am being stretched and need support and where to turn when I want to celebrate.

So often it isn’t about what we can change in others or even the situation, because when it comes to others we can’t change them and more often than not we can’t change the situation… but we can always change our approach, our intention, our purpose, our direction. Sometimes it is about holding on just a little longer, sometimes it is about letting go a little bit sooner, sometimes it is about trusting and acting on faith and sometimes it is about waiting for a little more evidence.

But the one thing I know for sure, a life worth celebrating is one that you carefully craft, holding the balance and tension of love and loss, growth and pain, hope and despair, laughter and tears.

It is a gift.

And in finding your way through, being stretched, being held, being guided, I hope you are learning to dance in the midst of it all.

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Questions…

Posted in Shifts on August 3, 2011| 1 Comment »

Bubbles

Sometimes there are thoughts that won’t leave me alone. They keep popping up in my head, in conversation and in moments when I least expect it.

Lately that has been this thought:

If you want better answers you have to ask better questions.

And it has been showing up in so many different areas of my life lately.

So often we keep asking ourselves the same questions and wonder why we don’t move forward in our lives. We ask ourselves “Why isn’t my life working?” But yet we never stop to rephrase the question, or to ask a better question that might move us forward. “What do I need to live my best life?”, “What is working for me right now, and how can I do more of that?”, “Who do I have to support me and what do they say?”

Often we don’t ask the good questions of ourselves because we are afraid of the answer. Sometimes it just feels safer to stay in the muck.

But I can guarantee you, if you are brave enough to ask yourself better questions you will find better answers.

Another place this has been popping up is realizing how often we have the same conversations over and over again.

“How are you today?”

“Fine.”

“Oh, glad to hear it.”

There are times when conversations about the weather, or about things we don’t really care about are okay… but what about the times when you want a better answer? More often than not that can be remedied with a better question.

Anyone who knows me knows that I love to ask questions, and sometimes I will ask questions that make people slightly uncomfortable, because I genuinely want to know what moves you, what gets you through the day, what lights you up, what are you passionate about, what sustains you through the dark times, what does love look like for you, what moment in your life changed you…

We all have a story and I love to listen.

So I have been experimenting with questions lately that will get me better answers… and I thought I would share some… Some are appropriate for your good friends and some more so for those summer BBQ’s, but regardless inviting others into conversation is a powerful experience. We forget how so often we just want to see and be seen. Just think of the last time that someone really showed genuine interest in what you had to say, when they asked good questions and waited for your answer, how the conversation shifted, how the world of possibilities opened up and your relationship deepened.

We are made of stories, we are here to share them. Let’s ask better questions and get this party started!

What is the best thing that has happened to you since we last spoke?

What is working in your life?

How can I be of service to you? How can I help?

What are you passionate about? What lights you up?

What was the best meal you have had lately?

If you had a weekend to yourself to do whatever you wanted to do, what would you do?

Author Brene Brown talks about all of us being made of strength and struggle… and that to me begs the question “What is your strength and what is your struggle?”

I think all too often we get caught up in the same conversations, the same routines, the same complaints, and it drains us of our power. Asking better questions, focusing on what is right rather than what is wrong are easy ways to shift into better relationships.

So a question for you…

When has a question shifted something for you?

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