If you are new to my writing and life, a little about me so we can get to know each other. Originally from Oregon, I've lived in Baja California Sur, Mexico in the small beach town of Los Barriles for thirty years. I am beginning to transition from living full time in LB to little bits of time on our Rancho el Aventadero. I recently retired from the high pressured and deeply rewarding livelihood of architecture and business shared with my engineer husband for twenty five years.
This
year, our youngest will graduate from high school. An empty nest on a knoll awaits us
part or full time.
Every
week, I choose a theme, an attitude, a word. Something I can delve into, develop
and share in my classes.
This year is full of big transitions in our life.
Inspiration to start the year with Humor and a light heart.
New Years Day, for the first time in a long while, I wrote a poem titled,
The Party
in My Heart
Leaps of joy,
tiny bursts of happiness.
That is the up,
uplifting of my soul.
Balanced by
the drops
of sadness,
inner decent
into the knowing
of letting go.
Trusting this inner
dance, the music
within this container,
this body
my feet to carry me,
this face to face
the world.
The courage to
all the while
feel the party
inside my heart.
My relationship with humor and comedy goes back to remembering laughter with my parents as a child. Spans to laughing with my family. With two children – now ages 25 and 17 – living on one piece of property, a husband and our circus of pets, the quirks of each individual family member, the aging dog who runs into our legs and so we move with care, the younger energetic Ollie and three cats, I find humor to be a lifeline in the crazy wonders of sharing the daily existence with so many as we dance around each other, hang together and give each other loads of space.
When I was eleven, my parents separated and during that summer, I spent a lot of time at a friend’s house down the road where we lived in Crescent City, California. My friend’s parents would let me stay up late while everyone slept and I would watch stand up comedy on the tv in the living room. The healing power of laughter during a time of sadness and confusion when the world I knew had ended became a lifeline. A way of coping. Remembering then and onward into my life that when all falls apart or changes and uncertainty settles in, finding humor in the little things helps bring light to the dark corners of the heart. Humor as a lifeline and reminder that, as Jon Kabat-Zinn’s quote reminds us above, “Life is way too serious to take too seriously.”
Humor
is one of the foundational attitudes of Mindfulness. And the more we practice
Mindfulness Meditation, the more we can notice the interplay of all the attitudes and how
they support one another.
When I worked long days at a desk and from deep inside my imagination, drawing and designing custom homes or special spaces for our clients, sometimes, I would get stuck. Frustrated. To clear my mind, sometimes I would leaf through design books, or stand up, take a breath or break and one of my go-tos was again, comedy. Laughter reminded me to loosen my grip and let go a bit so I could dive in and continue on.
My favorite comedians share the same characteristics as my favorite meditation teachers: they are wise and insightful, down to earth, kind and compassionate, truthful and share how they don’t take themselves too seriously. They share depth, as well as, a light hearted sense of humor which comes from experience and humility.
Through mindfulness, we can become aware of when and where there is a struggle or suffering and when possible --- and appropriate --- remember the possibility, the invitation to recognize our humanity with humility and humor for this human predicament.
- Where is humor inspired in your own life?
- Where does humor naturally arise for you?
- Where might a little more humor – when and where it is appropriate – fit into your daily life?
The healing power of laughter is at the heart of my home and family. Humor arises when I share with one of my kids, “I had a terrible dream last night.” And the response with a smile is, “Did you have another dream about teaching, Mom?” And the reminder that in all my years of high stress design-build work, I never had so many nightmares. The humor of a terrible dream being, I fell asleep while I was teaching and all my students left the room. The humor in remembering the years ago when I regularly attended a weekly yoga class and see my reflection in the mirror, a red faced strained warrior II pose and then remember to lighten the grip and relax a bit. How serious does a warrior pose really need to be? The humor and tenderness in moments walking on the beach before dawn with my husband during a particularly challenging period of raising a teenager and through the tears, saying, I know, the primary message I’ve given my kids is: ‘Be who you are. Don’t let anyone tell you who you are. Discover for yourself.’ And the humor when I realized that meant I had to change to adapt when I thought I had thought of every possible scenario and my imagination ran short. And through the tears, I let go and laughed. The compassion and kindness of my husband holding space for my tears and my laughter and letting me have my experience without trying to change what I was feeling, how I was relating to the changes in our lives or even the shift from tears to laughter and then tears again.
Life will fill space with unimagined wonder. Curve balls will fly. People will die. And life will go on. We cannot wait for better times when the clouds are overhead or darkening our heart. There are times when laughter is easier to access than others.
Humor doesn’t have to result in laughter. Humor isn’t always the answer. Or even appropriate. When I was preparing classes for last week with developing the theme of humor, I realized I wasn’t feeling very funny. I found humor in that. And the reminder that taking life a little less seriously doesn’t mean we have to laugh about it. Or even smile. Or find anything funny. Letting our experience be what it is and our feeling states to be as they are – irritation, anger, sadness, whatever is there – and holding it lightly is a way of taking life a little less seriously, struggling and suffering a little less. And every bit of letting go and letting be can lead us to more ease and increased capacity to be with this moment-to-moment experience of being fully human.
Humor arises from humility and connects us, reminds us of our shared humanity. Wherever we are, however we are, we are not alone.
When humor arises and laughter bubbles up and I feel happiness, I give gratitude for the gift of remembering and knowing, this too will change.
May
your heart be light and your humor kind.
Humbly
yours,
Tehroma
So Much Happiness
By Naomi Shihab Nye
“It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.
With
sadness there is something to rub against,
a
wound to tend with lotion and cloth.
When
the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up,
something
to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change.
But happiness floats.
It
doesn’t need you to hold it down.
It
doesn’t need anything.
Happiness
lands on the roof of the next house, singing,
and
disappears when it wants to.
You
are happy either way.
Even
the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house
and
now live over a quarry of noise and dust
cannot
make you unhappy.
Everything
has a life of its own,
it
too could wake up filled with possibilities
of
coffee cake and ripe peaches,
and
love even the floor which needs to be swept,
the
soiled linens and scratched records . . .
Since there is no place large enough
to
contain so much happiness,
you
shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you
into
everything you touch. You are not responsible.
You
take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit
for
the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it,
and
in that way, be known.”
Love the poem...I like that style of stopping and starting each thought it has rhythm! Well written, enjoyable to read and has an important message!
ReplyDelete