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Strength is Happiness

Today's best 'lobsterquotes'

Lobsterquotes is the twitter handle of an optimist (I'm assuming) who posts inspirational quotes.  I can't click "favorite" fast enough to save all of the ones that catch my attention. 

I had a good evening with the kids, forcing myself to breathe peacefully and FOCUS on the end of the kids movie we were watching, rather taking the opportunity to fret about work/legal matters.  And if my mind wandered there, I thought healthy thoughts about what a healthy perspective would look like.

So when I opened my computer after they both went to bed, each twitter lobsterquote came with a calm breathe that took absolutely no thought or effort, and with a calm little wave of endorphines.

These are the ones I could "favorite" fast enough to save (gems, all of them).

A contented man is always rich~proverb

To know the road ahead, ask those coming back~Chinese Proverb

If you treat every situation as a life and death matter, you'll die a lot of times~Dean Smith

Family is a haven in a heartless world~Lasch

If you realized how powerful your thoughts are, you would never think a negative thought~Peace Pilgrim

We cannot rise higher than our thought of ourselves~ Orison Swett Marden

Happiness lies, first of all, in health~George William Curtis

More Yoga ~ Less Pain

In my early months of CFIDS, yoga was too much for me.  This is certainly not comprehensible to people in full health.  But there it is (and here are some pre-CFIDS yoga photos from a Glacier backpacking trip in 2009).

An awesome sleep technician with fibromyalgia lent me a DVD she had been using to manage pain.  She warned me that it would not feel like much when I was able to do it, but to start slow, as it would be more for my body than it seemed.  She said 20 minutes made her sore for a week.  I couldn't grasp that until I tried it, and she was absolutely right.  Yoga was always calming for me pre-illness, especially in live classes, but it wasn't 'enough' for me if I were looking for a work out or trying to build strength.  But five minutes was indeed enough to make me sore.

Renunciation

I am a novice to meditation and fairly ignorant of Buddhism, aside from sharing the generic generalizations that most of the western world probably shares (peace, chanting, an acknowledgement of wisdom and tranquility without much knowledge or first hand proof of these attributes).  The buddhist analogy for the word renunciation that I just read fits so closely with what I am beginning to experience internally, however, that I wanted to capture it before it flitted away (though I may find later that my ignorance of buddhism has led me to a peripheral or inaccurate interpretation of the concept).  I hope to experience this in a more physical sense, too, when I step free of CFS.

From an article on letting go (http://www.insightmeditationcenter.org/2010/06/letting-go/):

"We can see the Buddhist emphasis on what is gained through letting go by how the tradition understands renunciation. While the English word implies giving something up, the Buddhist analogy for renunciation, is to go out from a place that is confined and dusty, into a wide open, clear space. It is as if you have been in a one room cabin with your relatives, snowed in for an entire winter. While you may love your relatives, what is gained when you open the door and get out into the spring, probably feels exquisite.

One of the nice things about letting go into something is that it has less to do with willing something or creating something than it does with allowing or relaxing. Once we know how to swim, it can be relaxing to float by allowing the water to hold us up. Once we know how to have compassion, there may be times when we not only let go of ill-will, but also let go into a sense of empathy. Letting go of fear, may then also be resting back into a sense of calm."

There are all types of directions I could take this line of thought, but as I am regaining my powers of concentration, I feel that baby steps are the right approach, so I'll let the idea rest for now in its own form.