Cultivating Patience, kind of

"Patience and fortitude conquer all things." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Tcha! What does Ralph know? Okay, maybe he might be right, at least some of the time, but the simplicity of his statement makes it seem like a no-brainer. I consider myself to be on the greater side of patience, I can sit with a six year old and teach him to tie his shoelaces over and over and over again with humor and calm. But there are some times when it feels like having patience is to be superhuman, a feat reserved for the likes of comic book heroes, of whom, I am most certainly not. I'm a go-getter, generally speaking I make goals and I take the steps to accomplish those goals. But it's the times when it feels I have almost no control over either the process or the outcome that I'm most desperately impatient. I know, I know, it's called letting go. Tcha, again!

So Ralph isn't my cup of tea in this, what about:

"Faith is not simply a patience that passively suffers until the storm is past. Rather, it is a spirit that bears things - with resignations, yes but, above all, with blazing, serene hope." - Corazon Aquino

I think I can kind of get with Corazon on this one. He acknowledges that patience can sometimes hurt but he counters that hurt with hope. Hope fuels the will to keep the faith despite any bumps or bruises along the way. But hope can feel pretty dim as well every once in a while. How do you rebuild your hope? For me, sometimes, it can be as simple as cooking a meal. This might sound weird, but I really like chopping stuff. So today, I made a hand-chopped basil pesto. You might think this is time consuming and arduous. You would be right. But there's something about the total sanity in chopping the garlic, basil, and pine-nuts that brings a sense of peace and calm to my soul. There's a realness to making a meal - putting the ingredients together, timing things just right, cleaning as I go, tasting for seasoning, and realizing a final beautiful and scrumptious product to nourish my body and my senses. And all of a sudden I realize the anxiety I was holding seemed to melt away in my focus on the task at hand. Maybe now I'm in a better place to be able to see some hope and grasp at it with hesitation at first and tenacity in the end. At least, until next time.

Cultivating patience seems to be a never-ending pursuit. As soon as you feel you've achieved it, life throws another curve-ball at you that pokes, prods, and tests it. Either you choose to give in and give up or you pick yourself up off the floor, dust yourself off, tell the worries to shush, and do your darnedest to re-capture that elusive hope. Good luck friends, I'm right there with you.

Defining Your Own Life

I was reading the Post this weekend and came across a letter awash with sadness, tears, and loneliness from a woman seeking advice from Carolyn Hax, the Post's relationship guru. In the letter, a self-reported stable and active woman tells a tale of woe in which she is almost asking Hax for permission to settle with a "just-okay" partner in order to alleviate feelings of loneliness that are wracking her very soul. The full letter and Carolyn's response can be found here.

I liked Hax's response to the letter. She writes, "You’ve evolved, your life has evolved, your desires have evolved, and your family has dissolved. Please don’t apologize to anyone — yourself least of all — for rewriting your definition of attractiveness to reflect a basic and duly recognized desire for steady companionship."  How true it is that we can allow ourselves to hate peas when we were young and develop a newfound love for them as an adult. But when it comes to what we look for in a partner, it's harder to give up the same criteria we used from when we were still dreaming about Prince Charming. But this is a somewhat loaded topic, there are plenty of people who have very polarizing views on the concept of "settling" and may have statements to make about lack of self-love, confidence, self-esteem, and insecurity, and many of those responses might be true for a horde of other people dealing with similar issues. The take-away message from this post is that it's okay to feel the way you feel, to be who you are, and to behave in the way that makes you most happy. You shouldn't have to apologize for valuing security over passion or vice versa. Accept your own definitions, your own meanings, for your life!

Self-Care

Oludeniz Beach, Turkey

Recently, I was feeling a bit sluggish at work. Responding to emails a little slower than normal, putting off filling out invoices, being a bit more haphazard with my accounts, etc. I started to notice the signs and symptoms of work exhaustion, known in its most severe form as the dreaded, "Burn-out." (Cue ominous dun-dun-duunnn music.) I wasn't quite at burn-out levels, I still enjoyed my job, still found joy and reward in my weekly sessions with clients but I didn't have that same level of vim and vigor for my practice that I had earlier in the year. All very self-aware of me to notice this, no? Well, I'll confess that it was somewhat brought to my attention when I was conducting a group clinical supervision session for a couple of graduate-level social work students. I was inquiring as to the students' level of burn-out and exploring what self-care strategies they had devised for themselves, if any. Which of course got the mental juices working and I slowly came to the realization that I, myself, have been neglecting that all-important concept of "self-care."

Self-care sounds just a bit too cheesy and jargon-y for me which is probably why it's not really in my normal vocabulary, but admittedly it gets right to the point. No matter what job you're in and no matter how much you love it, there will likely come a point when you find yourself to be inordinately tired, physically, mentally, and emotionally, by the mere thought of getting up in the morning and going to work. The red light blinking on your phone fills you with dread because you just know someone, or likely several someones, has left you a voicemail with tasks, requests, and possibly criticism.

Come Tomorrow

I'm guilty. I'm guilty of putting things off until the last minute. I've been this way my whole life. Procrastination, it feels like a weight bearing me down until I am almost crushed. But at the same time, I'm infused with a sense of responsibility and integrity. Procrastination and responsibility do not go hand in hand, in fact it's more like they are in constant conflict with one another. Why can it feel so impossible to begin, much less finish, a necessary task right now rather than tomorrow or the next day or the next until all of a sudden you're far behind and have to climb out of the hole you've dug for yourself? What would have been easy to do today becomes nigh impossible when you finally get around to it. It's not like I'm unintelligent, I'm fully aware of the argument for being timely with tasks I'm not so excited to accomplish. And yet, somehow I manage to convince myself time and time again that this time, it's not a big deal, I really can do the job tomorrow and be completely fine. I read a blog post today on Huffington Post written by Sadhguru, an Indian philosopher who founded the Isha Foundation which administers yoga centers around the world. He writes about the phenomenon of procrastination in a beautiful way that I never thought of before.

Quality vs. Quantity

The most popular article on nytimes.com right now discusses the changing face of psychiatry in the United States. A psychiatrist tells a sad story of how his practice has changed from one of care and careful attention serving individual patients with names and stories to one of cold efficiency administering medications in a veritable factory of nameless faces. Dr. Levin laments the loss of humanity in his practice due to the nature of health insurance reimbursement. In psychiatry, insurance companies will not reimburse physicians for their time spent getting to know the patient's life and narrative. They pay a set amount per quantifiable action which is often valued quite cheaply forcing physicians (and mental health clinicians) to pack as many patients into as short a time as possible in order to make a living and pay off education and training loans. This makes developing a personal relationship with patients next to impossible which in turn leads to decreased job satisfaction on the part of the healthcare provider. Perhaps this system might make some sense for conventional medical doctors, but a psychiatrist must depend in large part on the personal side of appointments to come to an accurate and appropriate diagnosis and consideration of treatment options.

Psychotherapists who do not prescribe medication, bill insurance companies for the cost of a 50-minute therapy session and often have to fight with insurances to authorize mental health treatment and obtain reimbursement in a timely fashion. The back-and-forth phone calls with insurance companies - being transferred from one operator to another, put on hold, and receiving conflicting information from different people - is arduous, time-consuming, and frustrating.