Soup With a Fork

I feel like trying to balance my life right now is like eating soup with a fork. School is pouting as it sits in the optional third row seating in the Volvo station wagon of my life, instead of sitting up front next to me in the passenger seat. In the passenger seat is my social life - and it's acting like a sullen teenager.

I'm having difficulty prioritizing. Scratch that, I'm having difficulty with my priorities. School should be on the top of my list, right? THEN my work, then my social life, right? That's what the list looks like, so it's not the prioritizing per say, it's what's actually taking priority.

Enter: Sullen Teenager Social Life
I have serval groups of friends, some are friends with each other, others are sort of on their own. Overall though, I have a core that's usually at the top of my list for quality time. Lately, I've felt I've given them the shaft. Kind of unconsciously. It seems like all of a sudden, friends are coming out of the woodworks that need to spend time with me that aren't a part of that core and I feel obligated - usually due to the amount of time that has passed since we last saw each other - to arrange a social event. In the meantime, this core that usually trumps is now falling down the ladder and I'm not doing much to stop it.

One thing on my list of things that make me unhappy is poor social life management. I'm not managing my social life well right now - so I'm unhappy. I'm starting to feel that I'm just thinking myself to death, and not doing anything. And while I'm trapped in my head contemplating what Zen means to me, life has come at me full blast and I've - like a zombie - said Yes to one too many things. Truth: I miss spending every weekend with my core. A couple of weekends ago I thought it would be nice to give other friends some attention, but in reality, I just missed the people I wasn't with.

Current Zen Road Block: Managing the social life.
Detour: Pop in the 4-Wheel drive and bust through the barrier.

Now that the cause of my unhappiness has been determined, I can fix it. I think.

A Response...To Myself

That last post got me thinking...

I feel a need a daily reminder. You would think the tattoo would be enough. I mean come on, I paid a guy a buck twenty to scar my body for life with a personal holy trinity. You would think that that would keep me on track. But I find myself forgetting what it is I’m really after. I get distracted with random rest stops on the side of the road. Not even good attractions or scenic areas, but rest stops. A honey bucket and an old bulletin board about tree life in the Pacific Northwest is what I find I think about more than heading to Serenity Lake.

I thought this blog would serve as a pretty good reminder, but it turns out I kind of forget about it more than I think about it. I need a visual. A huge sign that says “Go Directly to Zen, Do Not Pass Go, Do Not Collect $200.” Hm, I sense an art project in the making. Perhaps a collage of things that bring me happiness, inspirational quotes, a huge picture of the Dahli Llama giving me a thumbs up…This problem may have just figured itself out.

The List

(Okay, so acutally I had this musing a week or so ago, and just found it again. I think it's necessary to post)

How will I know when I find Zen? This question has been plaguing me for the past four weeks. I have no answer, no idea where to find the answer (lie: I’m pretty sure I can find the answer within myself, I just don’t know how, or which closet of my soul to look in). I can’t exactly type this one in to ask.com.

So I find myself frustrated. I want Zen and I want it now. (And I kind of want it covered in chocolate)

This expedition so far has tuned in my philosophical side. Finally! My minor is put to good use. But am I philosophizing about pertinent things? I feel I embarked on this journey to ultimately better myself in some way. Not to just lose weight and be happy, but to focus on what it is that makes me happy and not allow things that make me unhappy control my life.

Enter: THE LIST

Things that make me happy
Being confident in my body
Cooking for myself successfully
Spending quality time with friends and family
Getting good feedback from work
Feeling like I’m learning in school
Chocolate chip cookies
Puppies and Kittens

Things that make me unhappy
Feeling fat
Making poor food choices (well, it usually makes me happy at the time, but then I feel unhappy afterwards)
Not balancing time between people well
Douche bags

Seems simple enough. Note to self: avoid feeling fat, poor food choices, poor social life management and douche bags. Done. And apparently I feel this will bring me Zen. It’s a possibility. Frankly, everything’s possible (or is it anything’s possible?) on the road to Zen. But am I going to feel like a better person if I’m confident, a chef, a good friend/daughter/sister, an academic and cookie monster? Maybe. I guess we’ll have to see.

A Nagging Frustration

This is hard. This is really hard. I’ve sort of figured out what Zen means to me – My Zen if you will – but it’s hard to keep it in mind at all times. I feel particularly Zen when I do yoga in the morning, and then sit and sip my coffee and contemplate happy things. I don’t feel particularly Zen when I step on the scale and it reads the same number as last week.

This wasn’t supposed to be about losing weight – but it so is. I don’t want it to be about the number, I want it to be about how I feel. I also want to find a million dollars in my couch cushions. Should I just accept that it’s about the number? That this magical arbitrary numeric value will determine my happiness? That’s what frustrates me. I don’t want a number to control my happiness. I need to reconstruct this concept. But…how?

I guess part of why I think about this is that this whole resolution started because I wanted to not be fat anymore. I wanted to be able to control my urges to drive through Muchos (mmm Muchos…) and learn to cook healthy, tasty meals. I have sort of learned that – turns out I can actually read and follow a recipe without burning down my kitchen. But what I haven’t learned is what it takes to lose weight, keep it off, and maintain/make healthy choices. I feel like people who have found their Zen are happy with all aspects of their life. Well, I’m not happy with my weight, or my food choices 100% of the time. Today for lunch I’m having a turkey sandwich and apple sauce, when I actually want to be having Yang’s and a diet Dr. Pepper. I went for the healthier choice, not so much because I wanted to, but because I felt like I had to. Because I felt like if I broke my resolution I would have wasted the last four or five weeks. And since I had been feeling rather UnZen lately, I figured maintaining some sort of consistency (eating a healthy lunch) would get me refocused. It sort of has, but mostly I’m thinking about Teriyaki chicken right now. I do believe this shall pass however. And once again, I’ll be full speed ahead on the road to Zen.

Slump

I've been feeling kind of un-Zen lately. And by lately I mean since about Friday afternoon, around 2. I don't really know why, I mean, my weekend was awesome and jam-packed with excitement, but for some reason things felt off. Maybe it was the lack of sleep, maybe it was the total disregard for my healthier food choices, maybe it was the fact that my left arm was in Memphis having the time of her life.

Whatever the reason, things felt strange all weekend. I felt spastic but tired, busy but bored, non-contemplative, unfocused, and kind of blah. Since I've started this Road to Zen I've done a lot of self-reflection and self-contemplation, looking for my inner peace and balance, aiming for calm and serenity over overwhelmed and depressed. But my mind would slip, and focus on things I don't want to care about anymore. I don't want to care that I don't have a boyfriend. I don't want to care that potato skins covered in cheese and sour cream taste better than a glass of water and pita chips. I don't want to care that I don't know what I'm going to do when I graduate.

That's really been bothering me. I've tried to maintain a fairly spontaneous and flexible lifestyle, while holding on to my driven nature, but I feel a conflict emerging. Spontaneity is not a fan of my Life Goal To Do list. And my Life Goal To Do list thinks spontaneity is a crack whore. This inner battle, inner struggle, down right war between the two, is throwing off my Zen. And when my Zen is out of whack, I find myself thinking about those other things I don't want to think about. I want to be happy being single. I want to make the healthy choice naturally. I want to tell my friends when they hurt my feelings or are being passive aggressive. I don't want to think that being single is a bad thing. I don't want to choose french fries over cottage cheese. I don't want to talk shit because my feelings are hurt.

This sucks. Zen is tough. It's tough to find, tough to keep, tough to live...I need a Zen maintenance man to come fix my broken peace and realign my balance.

Fresh Ink

I’m fully committed. Fully committed to finding My Zen, maintaining it, and utterly incorporating it into my lifestyle. That’s right, I got inked. Animus Corpus Spiritus – Mind Body Spirit. In finding My Zen, I believe unifying mind, body, and spirit is essential. Sound mind, healthy body, and good spirit. That, and tattoos make me look like a bad ass.

If I ever feel myself slipping, I can just gently remind myself of my goal by glancing over my shoulder (while looking in the mirror). Or better yet, have some stranger ask me what it means, to which I will be forced to reply “Mind Body Spirit. It’s my bad ass resolution. I’m on the road to Zen.”

Diet is a Four Letter Word

Nothing tastes as good as thin feels. A moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips (thighs, stomach, ass, whatever). Fight hunger. Starve for perfection. You are what you eat. And my personal favorite – You can’t spell diet without DIE.

Diets don’t work. At least, that’s what the weight watchers commercials tell me. And it’s true! Look at the phrases associated with diets. Go ahead, take a nice long look. It’s phrases like these that cause woman who would otherwise be perfectly happy, comfortable and possibly confident in their bodies to run screaming from the cookie isle – only to wind up down there two weeks later, because they just can’t kick the habit.

Nothing tastes as good as thin feels. So, what? I’m giving up all food? A moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips. Read subtext: it tastes good now, but you’ll hate yourself later. Fight hunger. Since when is eating a war? You get my point.

Part of My Zen is balance. A *gasp* balanced diet falls into this category. What’s a balanced diet mean though? Depriving myself of calories to fit into those skinny jeans? Running three miles for every donut I indulge in? Saying NO to all bad foods? Question: What is a bad food? A brownie that hijacked my car and stole my wallet? A side of fries that’s facing 25-life for murdering an eggplant?

I stepped on the scale this morning, feeling thin, confident, and excited to see what progress I had made. (Note: progress in this context is derrived from the idea that if the number on the scale is lower than when I started my road to Zen, I have somehow found a way to calculate and measure success) I peeked down to see what the blaring red numbers would tell me – one pound. One FUCKING pound. I haven’t eaten fast food in 10 days, I’m doing yoga an average of four times a week, I’m eating vegetables for Christ’s sake! And I’ve only lost a pound. I was so pissed off I started making excuses – Well, I did have a tall glass of water right before bed, maybe it’s water weight. Maybe I was standing funny so the reading was off. I did have that cookie at 10, maybe my stomach’s just clinging to those calories for…sport.

Okay, time for a self-intervention. Why am I getting so upset over one pound? Isn’t this supposed to be about turning over a healthy leaf, not about shedding massive amounts of weight? And hey, some people really struggle to loose one pound in a week, and here I am, pissed off that it wasn’t enough. What did I expect? That my body would be in such shock to not have its weekly (sometimes twice a week) bacon burrito or bacon waffle or BLT (hold the T) that I would be pulling numbers like the contestants on the biggest loser? Congratulations Casey, you’ve lost 18 pounds this week, how does that make you feel?

I had to talk myself down, stop beating myself up, and remind myself what’s really important – balance, peace, calm, serenity, Zen. I feel better at the beginning of this week than I did last week. A little more fit, making better food choices, more aware of being hungry versus bored. I refuse to let myself become/remain a woman whose self-efficacy is based on a number. Maybe I should throw out my scale…

Installment Three

I figure step one on the road to Zen would be to figure out what exactly Zen was. So I did what any self-respecting graduate student would do – I looked it up on dictionary.com. I found two definitions, neither of which could give me a concise answer to my question.

Zen
Noun, Chinese, Buddhism
1.) A school of Mahayana Buddhism that asserts that enlightenment can be attained through meditation, self-contemplation, and intuition rather than through faith and devotion and that is practiced mainly in China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam.
2.) The discipline and practice of this sect. See also, Zen Buddhism.
Zen Buddhism
Noun
1.) Zen.

Well that was helpful.

I decided to put my $40K graduate school education to good use and dissect the dictionary definition as much as possible to figure out where exactly I’m headed on this expedition. Enlightenment, meditation, self-contemplation and intuition. Hm. Enlightenment of what? Meditate how? This finding Zen thing is a lot harder without a road map. Which intuition exit do I take? Is that a left down self-contemplation, or a right? Enlightenment highway South bound or North bound?

During this quest of defining Zen I became tired and thirsty, so I broke down and paid the $5 my office immorally charges to use the water cooler (which by the way, is outrageous and very un-Zen). And maybe that’s the key. Maybe I can’t find the definition of Zen in a dictionary because there is no exact definition. Maybe it’s something that must be discovered on a more personal level. Self-contemplation and intuition are two buzzwords when it comes to all things Zen, maybe my answer lays in there. Or maybe I need a new question: What is my Zen?

*Me versus The*

I think the road to Zen needs to be personal. Therefore from now on, when referring to all things Zen, I shall use first person. MY way, MY enlightenment, MY meditation, MY self-contemplation. MY choice, MY lifestyle, MY peace, MY journey, MY road. After all, it is MY Zen, right?

So what exactly is MY Zen? I think it’s time for a little word association, don’t you? Hey if it worked for Freud…

Zen:
Balance
Peace
Calm
Serenity
Monk
Dahli Lamma
Karma
Ooh! Those cute little Zen gardens they sell at Target! With the sand and the rocks and that little rake (Okay, this is getting out of hand)

My road to Zen shall include stops at Balance Junction, Peace City, Calm Town, and Serenity Lake (Oh dear.) Okay that was cheesy. But it’s something to think about, to consider, to mull over if you will. Embarking on a journey without knowing exactly what or where the destination is putting all faith in yourself. What the word Zen means to me, or brings to my agile mind, is what I need to achieve/experience/attain/endure (Whatever!) in order to reach Zen. Maybe my difficulty in defining Zen is due to its shifting definition for each person. And defining MY Zen can be done in four little words: Balance, Peace, Calm and Serenity.

Namaste

I used to be athletic. It’s true. But somewhere along my way, fitness and I just weren’t working out. We had to break up. I was cheating on it with fatty food and laziness. But every now and then fitness and I run into each other, we chat, and there’s chemistry just like old times…then laziness stops by, and its seduction is just too hard to resist.

I found myself last night putting off doing my yoga routine for no apparent reason. I was a little tired, a little hungry, and frankly listening to my Zune and filling out MySpace surveys sounded a lot more appealing than downward dog. So I made myself a light dinner (okay, I cheated, it was a frozen entrée and rice) and sat down to finish watching an episode of the Sopranos. About five minutes into the show and three bites into my meal, I felt guilty. Five days into the New Year and I’m already giving up? This is not a philosophy I want to live by.

So I put on my yoga pants, rolled out my mat, and kicked my cat out of the apartment. 10 minutes into the routine I noticed I was holding warrior two stronger than I had been in the past. I was even able to do the side plank pose unmodified! I was hit with a rush of adrenaline. I could feel my muscles working hard to support my body, my heart rate increasing, the calories burning, there may have even been a bead of precipitation forming along my hairline (I wouldn’t know, I don’t really sweat).

Afterward, I felt amazing. I was left with that natural high you can really only achieve by knowing you just kicked your own ass. Finally I have felt the benefits of exercise without the pain of sore muscles, the cost of gym memberships, or the embarrassment of being out of breath six steps into a jog. Yoga has brought me peace with fitness. Sorry laziness, it’s over between you and me.

Installment One

A shout out to my sister for giving me inspiration. She is (as it appears) documenting her year upholding her resolution via the blogging world. I’ve decided to give it a try, how hard can it be?

Just about every year, the day after Christmas (or sometimes during the weeks before), I think about which resolution I’ll make, keep up for three weeks, and then eventually ditch for something more fun like drinking. This year was no different.

I decided it was high time I became more physically active. I hate people who sit around and bitch about not having the body they wish they had, as they turn on the John and Kate Plus 8 marathon on TLC and remain sedentary for the next eight hours, and sadly I had become one of them. And so it began – my new year’s resolution to be more active. I decided to stick with the vague concept at first, my way of cheating myself into thinking I’ve actually upheld my resolution throughout the year by not defining what “more active” means.

But what sort of physical activity would I introduce into my lifestyle? Walking? Too cold. Running? Too intense. Swimming? Haha, yeah right. So, what? I needed something indoors, at-home available, that would burn fat and tone muscle without me having to do too much. And then I thought about my sister. She’s done yoga off and on for a few years now, and loves it. Perfect! I was set. I recruited my BFF to become a yoga master with me – “Oh! I’ve always wanted to carry a yoga mat around and be like, Yeah, I totally do yoga.”

But, like all of my scathingly brilliant ideas, things evolved. Suddenly just adding physical activity wasn’t enough anymore (and of course by this time it had finalized itself to ‘doing yoga every morning’), I had to actually change something. While watching TLC’s documentary on super morbidly obese people – Half Ton Dad – two things dawned on me: A.) Tight yoga bodies don’t form overnight and B.) I eat WAY too much fast food. I quickly put my cognitive behavior counseling skills to work and assessed patterns in my fast food consumption – when I eat it, where I eat, how much – and discovered two things: 1.) I eat it when I’m suddenly hungry and can’t find a prepared snack within arms reach, or can’t be ‘hassled’ with preparing a lunch to take to work and 2.) The amount I consume per visit had increased. Yup, I was on my way to having my own TLC documentary – The Fatal Bite: The story of a young woman who ate herself to death. This of course did not stop me from finishing the bacon burrito I had just purchased.

So now I had resolved to add physical activity and cease fast food consumption. But still I needed more. Well, needed is a strong word. I felt diet and exercise are really the most cliché resolutions anyone could come up with, so I had to do something different. I added notions like ‘write more’, ‘keep my house clean’, ‘cook healthier food’, and ‘spend less time wasted on sites like Facebook and more time with the three dimensional people’. Basically, better my life.

And so my resolution entered its final stage of evolution: This year, will be my year of Zen. (Okay, really, it’s my year of trying to find Zen/maintaining Zen/figuring out what the hell Zen really is).

Thus, I have concocted this blog to aid in my maintenance of my resolution (which has a sub-resolution of: keeping a resolution for a whole year). I call it: The Road to Zen. I have some concerns with the title of course – feeling the word ‘Road’ suggests I believe this will be easy, or that I will find Zen like a hitchhiker on the side of the highway. But at the same time, ‘Path’ seems too short term, too impermanent. There is something about the concrete of a road that seems a fitting metaphor. Not to mention the appealing sleekness of freshly paved blacktop and the seductive suggestion of getting my kicks on route 66. Plus, think of the photograph for the book cover! (What? I dream big.)

So there you have it. This blog will be my documentation of my travels down The Road to Zen. What exactly that will encompass, I’m still not sure.