Long, Hard Day at the Office

This post is an effort to deliver an important PSA: Stress is real and part of life and there’s no such thing as being “above” the sway of it. Thinking that it’s some kind of personal moral or spiritual failure when we feel maxed out or stressed out, is a sign that we have more work to do in the personal growth department. 

I find it continuously disappointing that when I attempt to share honestly with someone that I’ve had a hard day, I am then in the position of needing to do one of two things: 1) put up with unsolicited, unwelcome, unneeded, and typically unhelpful advice or 2) muster up the energy it takes (and don’t currently have) to qualify that I’m not broken and therefore not in need of fixing.

Friday was a long, hard day in the office. Without going into too many details that no one will find interesting, I’ll just say that the phone kept ringing, the emails kept coming, problems kept presenting, tech glitches kept happening, and the struggle to keep all the balls in the air was real.

Upon discovering that I work as a paid employee in the registration office of a Buddhist monastery, some people seem to be wildly confused about how there could possibly be such stress involved in the work that we do. People also seem to have strange notions centered around “if you’re a good practitioner, then stress should no longer be a thing.” So this is me wanting to share with you that despite the setting, office work is still office work. Computer work is still computer work. And customer service still means interacting with lots of humans, who are not calling or emailing to tell you how good of a job you’re doing. 

Additional important PSA: Anyone who works in a job field that involves interfacing with the daily demands of the public all day are unsung heroes, many of whom are over-worked and under-paid. May we all up our game and be nicer.

I don’t think it’s common knowledge that there’s a way to recognize & interact with stress without catastrophizing the situation. That there’s a way to be present with stress when it arises in a way that does’t involve falling into the depths of its current. That feeling stressed out is NOT a moral failure, but simply part of what it means to be human. I think the fact that I am able to experience stress without allowing it to reduce my self-worth, and not view it as an indicator that I’m doing something wrong, is a foreign concept to most people. Hence the need I see for this particular post. 

On Discomfort

I don’t know if you know this, but discomfort abounds. On a regular, consistent, ongoing basis, discomfort is an intrinsic part of our life on the daily. If we were never taught (and most of us weren’t) or haven’t trained ourself (and most of us haven’t) how to develop skills to interact with discomfort when it arises, it’s likely that we’ve learned to default into what I call the Three D’s: distract, distance, or drown. 

While there are many different coping strategies for dealing with discomfort when it arises, in my experience, the Three D’s are the most prevalent and common. 

The Three Default D’s of Dealing with Discomfort 

1. Distract. When discomfort arises, our default mode might be to distract ourself from the stimulus at hand. Examples include: reaching for our phone to do a thing; turning on the TV to watch a thing; coming up with a reason to rifle through our pockets or our bag or whatever we have on our person; chattering nervously with who ever is nearby; busying ourself with task after task after task. 
2. Distance. Or our default mode might be to distance ourself from the stimulus at hand. While this one is fairly self-explanatory, some ways this shows up include: not going somewhere because we’re unfamiliar with it; not doing something because we don’t know what to expect; not attending an event because we know someone will be there we don’t like. 
3. Drown. Or our default mode might be to drown out the discomfort spurred on by the stimulus at hand. Some examples include: drinking alcohol; using drugs; over-working; shopping; stress eating; being promiscuous; binge watching; gambling; adventure-seeking. 

We might have a standard go-to default mode or we may vacilitate between the Three D’s, or we may have any number of other mechanisms for dealing with discomfort when it crops up. Point is, we do something when we are met with discomfort, and it’s likely that something is either hampering our quality of wellness, or actively discouraging us from moving in the direction of cultivating balance, solidity & ease.

I’m not at all suggesting that we never do any of the above mentioned things. In my view, it’s not only super okay to venture into the territory of the Three D’s, but it might even be a really good idea, in order to help manage certain acute feelings of overwhelm. What I am suggesting is that it’s worth investigating what our default mode is, and how often we visit & hang out there. By design, our default mode involves having little to no personal agency. We simply fall into it out of habit, without much, if any, thought. Starting to work with the strategies we’ve developed to interact with discomfort when it arises is about starting to live more purposefully. It’s about learning how to make conscious decisions, verses operating on auto-pilot. 

I find it helpful to think about discomfort as existing on a spectrum. Our discomfort can range anywhere from mild to moderate to severe. We all have an inner discomfort meter. However, what pings on the meter, and where on the spectrum it clocks in at, will be different for each of us. For example, when met with a challenging personal interaction, person A’s meter might ping in the moderate range while person B’s meter pings in the extreme. Or when encountering a long line at the post office, person A’s meter might ping in the mild range while person B’s meter doesn’t register anything at all. 

Why is any of this important? Whelp, if we’re constantly defaulting to one of the Three D’s when we experience discomfort, our comfort zone has the tendency to shrink smaller & smaller. As time goes on, we grow more & more intolerant, to the point where even the slightest inconvenience can cause our meter to ping at unreasonably high levels. There is a direct correlation between our comfort zone and our quality of life. The smaller our comfort zone is, the less able we are to feel at ease in our own skin, and in the world. 

On Healthy Boundaries

A topic I have current interest in centers around investigating what it means to have healthy boundaries. In the circles I hang out in, I often hear the term “healthy boundaries” being used, but seldom have I experienced anyone offering any real substance about what it means or how to have them. Commonly suggesting that healthy boundaries are a good idea is akin to encouraging someone to cultivate joy. Without offering further guidance and practical applications, many of us simply have little to no frame of reference on how to insert such things into our daily life. Without developing a deeper understanding and learning some helpful tips & tools, it’s hella easy for certain things to just be & stay a nice thing that sound like a really good idea, without ever gaining the necessary traction to be put into action. 

Here’s what I think, in essence, a HB (healthy boundary) involves: saying yes when it’s time to say yes, and saying no when it’s time to say no. We’ll be able to ascertain “when it’s time” when we decide to enter into an active relationship with ourself. Our ability to discern when it’s time to say yes and when it’s time to say no will increase the more we practice to make a conscious effort to create the space & time necessary to check in with how we’re feeling, and what’s going on within & around us in the present moment. Without a willingness to develop a good working relationship with ourself & our surroundings, creating HB’s will be a non-starter. 

In the beginning, no doubt figuring out what our own HB are will be and feel a little – or a lot – clunky. Like a young bird trying to figure out its whole new wing situation, it’ll take some time for us to work out our own HB’s. Over time, with practice, our process will become smoother & easier. Once we start getting in the swing of things, setting and maintaining HB’s will become second nature and won’t require as much lard labor. 

Some things that come up for me around HB’s:

1. HB’s involve a certain amount of flux & fluidity
2. HB’s do not just serve to support the person erecting them
3. HB’s take practice; they require trial & error. 

A Gal Amid Monks

It’s an interesting environment I find myself in when spending a few months dwelling inside of a Buddhist monastery. A place where the two hamlets are largely separate and organized by gender. 

In case you’re new here to my blog, I’ll set the scene a bit. 

When my husband and I come here to Deer Park Monastery, we stay together in Solidity Hamlet with the Brothers, which is where couples & lay men reside when they come here. Lay women stay with the Sisters in Clarity Hamlet. The hamlets are about a 10-min walk from one another and mostly operate independently. Both hamlets come together at certain times during the week, but in large part our meals and daily schedule are spent in the hamlet in which we reside. 

Pre-pandemic, Mike and I would come here annually and typically spend 3 or 4 weeks on retreat. But this is now our third year in a row spending a significantly longer period of time here. We’ve been here now for a little over 4-months, with about 5 more weeks to go until we return back home to Montana. 

For the first few years that we came here, I opted to stay with the Sisters in Clarity Hamlet. But now, and for the past number of years, I’ve opted to stay with Mike in Solidity Hamlet. So over these last few years, I’ve been either the only gal staying in Solidity long-term, or one amid a very small crew. And while eventually, when we stay here long enough, I find myself feeling super ready to return home to the lovely graces of my female friends, there are a number of things I have a very unique opportunity to engage with when I’m here as a minority gender, which I truly appreciate, and don’t experience anywhere else. 

1. Reprieve from female figure fatigue syndrome. Even though this is a term I just made up right now, I imagine most/all females know what I’m talking about. Now, I am someone who dresses very modestly and simply in my daily life outside of the monastery. I wear the same color shirt every day (green) and the same color of pants (brown). I own 4 pairs of shoes. I’ve never been a clothes-horse and in no one’s eyes would I ever be seen as a fashionista. Don’t get me wrong, I care about what I wear, just not very much. And despite all of that, I still feel the pull of thinking I need to flaunt – or at least flatter – my figure. How do these pants make my butt look? Is this shirt too frompy? The cultural messaging runs deep, people. But all of that fizzles & fades away here. And. It. Is. Glorious. I am acutely aware that I am a gal living amid monks and I place a high value of importance of being respectful of the environment I’m in. Thus, when I’m here, I kick my modest dress style up a notch. The monastery is a wholesome, unsexualized environment and I personally deeply enjoy that aspect of being here. It gives me permission to interact with myself in a very specific way, which I find incredibly liberating. 

2. Creative ways to connect with feminine energy. Only recently have I started realizing that some of the little things I do here, I do because it puts me in touch with the feminine energy I feel I’m lacking. I seek out reading more books & poetry authored by women; I listen to more music with female singers; I talk with & sing to the moon when I see her out & about; and I am drawn to making closer contact with nature in ways that feel more feminine by design. All of these acts, while not absent in my daily life back home, are much more pronounced & feel more necessary here. 

3. The masculine/feminine interplay is important. Spending time here has shown me how much the masculine & feminine energies have to offer one another, and how beneficial each energy can be to the other one. While I am a big supporter of having gender-based affinity groups, where women have women-only spaces (which includes transgender women), men have men-only spaces (which includes transgender men), and non-binary folks have non-binary spaces, in my view, there is something detrimentally missing when the segregation of genders is prolonged. Please don’t get me wrong. I think in a monastery setting, the separation of genders makes a lot of sense. Nuns & monks have a specifically unique life aim, aspiration, and calling, which is supported, in part, by dwelling apart from one another. But as a lay practitioner, I feel there is something really important about the cross-pollination that happens when both energies mix & mingle. I’m not referring to our romantic or sexual drives here, I’m speaking about the nature of these energies as they operate together on an interactively higher human playing field. When I spend time here, I am able to get in touch with the true loveliness of masculine energy and the true loveliness of feminine energy.  How each one needs the other one to complete & express itself fully. The feminine yin to the masculine yang. 

On 23-Years of Being Married

This coming week, on March 9th, my husband and I will be celebrating 23-years of married life. As we were wed at the generally clueless age of 20 and 21, I reckon our continued union is thanks to the following ingredients: energetic compatibility, similar values, a shared spiritual practice, a mutual interest in personal growth work, big love for one another, a whole lot of applied effort, and a little bit of luck. And humor. We have a great appreciation for humor, comedy, playfulness, and having fun together. Were I to rank the ingredients by level of importance, our shared affection for humor would be way close to the top of the list (my list anyway).  

Here are some of the learnings I’ve picked up along my 23+ year (we dated just shy of a year before getting married) relationship with my husband Mike. These are learnings, by the way, that I’m still in active process with, as I’m of the belief that the best kinds of learning are ongoing and involve continuous unfolding. 

Also, I feel pretty sure that without having entered into a relationship with developing these understandings, one of two realities would currently be taking place: 1) I would be divorced & single, or paired with a different guy whilst making all the same missteps that I made with Mike (and all the dudes before him) or 2) we’d still be together…and we’d be miserable. 

I could easily fashion a lengthy blog post about each of the following, but for now, cuz I often find it an interesting writing practice to see if I can cut to the quick and whittle stuff down to its basic essence, I’ll attempt to keep this pithy (ish). 

My (continuing) learnings:

1. Being all in while maintaining personal sovereignty. This one has to do with not feeling as though I have to choose between being all in with my person OR being my own independent, capable self. It involves understanding and putting into practice the ability to invest in both simultaneously; not one at the expense of the other. It involves being deeply interconnected with my person while not getting overly and detrimentally enmeshed.  

2. Staying on my side of the fence. This one can be translated as: Nicole, do your own work. Don’t worry about what he’s doing. Keep your eyes on your own field of practice. This one involves me taking full responsibility for how I show up, and knowing that everything I do, say, and think is a choice I myself am actively making.