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Time for Tea

This is going to shock a lot of you, given the steady flow of coffee you’ve watched me drink day after day, but try to stay calm.

I’m drinking tea, and lots of it.

Mood music:

[spotify:track:4NlR3rwvLtLcLuKZxIiYp4]

This change wasn’t planned. No doctor told me to do it or risk a heart attack. And I haven’t given up my beloved java.

In recent days, I’ve started splitting the day between coffee and tea: coffee in the morning, tea in the afternoon and evening.

For whatever reason, I really started to crave tea Saturday afternoon. It could be because my mindfulness teacher keeps telling the class to “have tea with your problems” or “tea with your dragon.” When you have an addictive personality like mine, the more someone repeats something like that, the more you start to want it. It’s why I can’t hang out with people who want to talk about nothing but boozing. Before long, I start jonesing for a bottle.

I got home that afternoon and had some green tea. Later, I had some chamomile. It felt good. I felt more at ease. A new afternoon-evening habit was born.

Those who know me well know how much I love caffeine. Coffee is the main delivery system, along with Red Bull, though I haven’t had the latter for a couple weeks now. I simply haven’t felt like having it.

There’s a stupid part of me that sometimes resists change because I’ve spent so much time building up an image. Admittedly, I like the sober, bitter-coffee-swilling hardcore image I’ve built for myself. But the smarter part of me knows that it’s always best to try new things and expand one’s horizons. That’s why I started playing guitar again after nearly 20 years. Playing is quickly becoming my main addiction and I’m fine with that, because it means I’m not burying my face behind the laptop screen as much as I used to. I discovered Saturday that tea goes really good with guitar playing.

So here I am, drinking tea and coffee. Turns out, there’s plenty of room in the day for both.

Just as long as the writer doesn’t drink all the editor’s tea. —The Editor

Green Tea

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Life in a Place of Death

As regular readers know by now, I’ve been taking a class on how to keep my attention on the present. Saturday was an all-morning session that included a silent, hour-long walk through Oak Hill Cemetery in Newburyport, Mass. A lot of us tend to see cemeteries as a place of death. But I found a lot of life there, instead.

Mood music:

[spotify:track:4s4S5JJGfqXGlNY6eQZWQB]

This wasn’t a new experience for me. There are three cemeteries within walking distance of my house, and I’ve walked through all of them. I tend to look at the date of death and consider the myriad ways the person passed. If it’s 1918, for example, I find myself wondering if he or she died in the Spanish Flu pandemic. If a veteran died in the vicinity of early June 1944, I ponder the likelihood that this person died in the carnage of D-Day during WW II.

In Oak Hill Cemetery, I was stopped in my tracks by a gravestone with the death date of Sept. 11, 2001. I looked up the name, Thomas Pecorelli, and learned that he was on American Airlines Flight 11, which terrorists flew into the north tower of the World Trade Center. He was 30 when he died and was carrying the ultrasound image of his unborn child, headed home to his wife.

He lived a hell of a life. He was a cameraman with Fox Sports and E! Entertainment Television, the obituaries said.

Thieves stole his original gravestone, but a new one is in its place, complete with two benches and a garden with bird feeders.

There’s a lot of life to be found in these graveyards. But you might miss it if you jog through. You have to walk through slowly and silently.

If you have a mind that sometimes gets stuck on one obsessive thought or often drifts when someone is talking to you, the occasional cemetery stroll is worth working into your life.

Few things will get you out of your own head like a study of other people’s lives.

Now that I’ve learned something about giving my present attention to the dead, I’m eager for the next step: learning to give present awareness to the living.

Pecorelli Tombstone

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I Was Tricked Into Yoga

I’ve long balked at the idea of doing yoga. Frankly, it always looked boring to me. It didn’t fit the tough-guy image I have of myself, either. Tough guys don’t do a bunch of poses. They lift heavy things. Yet here I am, doing yoga.

Thing is, I’m starting to appreciate and respect it.

Mood music:

[spotify:track:3b04Qs9AoBRBIFu9aDQfqI]

How did I reach this strange place? My therapist tricked me.

For years, he’s been trying to push yoga on me as a tool to reduce stress and get out of my head. For years, my response has been “no fucking way.”

I recently signed up for my therapist’s Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction class because for a guy trying to manage clinical OCD, you need as many tools as you can gather. I’ve gotten the upper hand over the more insidious byproducts of my OCD in recent years, particularly the fear, anxiety and inability to go about my day because of the worry spinning in my brain. Now I enjoy many of the things I once feared, including travel, and I’m able to truly live. But I still get stuck in my head, which is bad when someone’s trying to talk to you. So I signed up for the class.

My therapist didn’t mention there’d be yoga involved. The bastard.

I knew I’d been duped when I walked into the first class and saw yoga mats carefully placed in a circle. He finally sprung it on us at last week’s class, and last night we really got into it.

My first thought was that the beginner’s positions were a lot like the exercises I used to do for a bad back. My second thought was that the poses were a pretty strenuous workout. I didn’t expect to break a sweat, but I did. There was something satisfying about it.

I’m supposed to do this once a day as part of my homework. That’s going to be tough, given my schedule. But I’m sure there’s a way.

Erin has done a lot of yoga in the past but not much lately. Maybe I can get her to do it with me.

If someone told me a year ago that I’d be pondering this stuff now, I’d have laughed in their face. Actually, I did just that to my therapist.

You won’t find me wearing yoga pants, though. That would be gross.

Crazy Yoga Pose

Ouch.
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Out of My Head

Like anyone with a mental disorder like OCD, I spend a lot of time locked in my head. My thoughts will be on what I’m doing the next day or a year out. Or they’re in the past, replaying scenes from long ago. Last night I began the mission to get out of there.

Mood music:

[spotify:track:7yqO8vYeyf8ahnLj9vOZ4G]

It was the first night of my Stress Reduction and Mindfulness class. The instructor is my therapist, though the other students don’t know that. He tells me this is the first class to include one of his patients. I entered a room full of yoga mats, cushions and funny little benches that look like the kneelers they put in front of the coffin at wakes.

“Fuck,” I thought to myself. “Right out of the gate we’re doing yoga.” I’ve resisted doing yoga forever. I don’t have a good reason for that. I guess I think it will just bore me.

In the end, we used the mats for a lie-down exercise designed to make us aware of our bodies and what they’re doing and feeling. A couple people fell asleep.

We practiced eating mindfully, taking a single raisin and staring at it, rolling it in out hands and keeping it in our mouths for a while before swallowing.

We left with homework. Among other things, I have to eat an entire meal mindfully instead of scarfing it down per usual. I also have to take an activity I do almost daily and do it mindfully, taking note of every aspect of the activity as I proceed. For fun, I think I’ll try this while shaving my head.

I can stare at the razor and look at its detail, stop every time I cut myself and study the pattern of the blood dripping from my scalp before washing it off. I’ll take note of how the water feels when rinsing off the cut. I can note the difference between the feel of a clean razor and one that’s getting clogged with my stubble.

I could also practice my guitar mindfully, noting the feel of the strings and the sounds I get as I randomly launch chords from up and down the neck. I’ve already discovered that you can’t really play the guitar without being mindful of every step. I can’t, anyway.

The ultimate goal is to be able to pay attention to every detail when I’m talking to someone or doing any number of other daily tasks where my mind tends to drift.

This should be interesting.

Mindfulness