Excited and a Little Scared in Everyday Ramblings

Not only is it Father’s Day but it is also the day of the Pride Parade here. Our downtown area is hopping and although it was cloudy and cool earlier it is lovely out now. I hope everyone has a fun celebratory day.

It’s been 35 years since my father died of a heart attack in his sleep. Blessedly we did have improved interactions the last couple of years he was with us; before that he was always a shadowy and difficult figure in my life. I was hard on him as a teenager and he could not deal and so I was sent off to live with my oldest sister.

Up until yesterday I had been thinking about the issues with my heart as a genetic gift from him, a luck of the draw kind of thing. He didn’t suffer, he was active and engaged and rational the day before he died and I am grateful for that. He did the best he could. I know that now.

I find well-constructed and thoughtful continuing education for yoga teachers irresistible and yesterday I was looking at some cool new content for teaching yoga to people with eating disorders.

The teaser for this program (that I happily purchased) is a short video about the physical effects eating disorders have on the heart, which is after all… a muscle.

Then she starts talking about anorexia specifically and the heart. Eek.

I was an anorexic teenager. Not a kind of wanna be anorexic, I had the full disease before the general public knew what it was. I say ruefully I was a trendsetter, but not in a good way. In my brain, now fully developed, I still have a lot of the thought patterns of a not healthy person that were laid down as my brain was developing.

You would not know it to look at me now, that is the thing about eating disorders, you can’t always see them, and that is part of the training here.

Anyway, the teacher says in no uncertain terms, anorexia damages the heart. It does so in a few different ways but one of the ways is something that has shown up on EKG’s my whole life, as Bradycardia, a slow heart rate. Since I became an adult my heart rate has been unusually low. The doctors always say, “Oh you must be really fit!”

I am but lurking behind that…is this.

A damaged heart.

I suppose I can be grateful for the assholes at work for behaving in such a discriminatory and ageist way for surfacing this fact.

Nah. I’ll skip that gratitude.

I think this training is going to be truly helpful for me. I have tried therapy a number of times and I remember Larry, my most recent long time therapist and Zen teacher used to always ask me when we were talking about what was going on…where do you feel that in your body?

The thing is I never knew.

I could approximate it, generally say, my stomach or my chest or whatever but I was basically faking it.

So here I am yesterday doing my big continuing ed homework and I am thinking oh I am going to be able to teach this deep meditative relaxation technique to my students in groups and it will be (and already is) nifty, but then they start talking about co-meditation.

What the heck? People meditate in groups sometimes but meditation is a private thing, right?

So this is a simple but very effective structure where you sit with one other person and you give them support in coming into a deeply meditative state and then you encourage them to describe it to you (and themselves). And “stuff” naturally arises. There are some simple pointers as a facilitator you can use to help the meditating person feel safe and comfortable but there is no agenda. You are not trying to fix anything or heal anything or change anything.

And I am supposed to practice doing this.

Whoa baby, this will be interesting. I am excited. And a little scared.

Last updated June 17, 2019