P52 Week 29 - Joy

A hot day in July. We find a lake. It’s big enough for powerboats. One roars by, pulling a giggling girl on an inner tube, but then the engine noise dissipates and all that remains are voices buzzing, squealing and crying, and water splashing and swooshing.

I step gingerly over the gravelly sand, wince as my soft footpads protest. I head for the dock, opting for the rapid water entry rather than the painfully slow, inching wading route.

The sun leaps and swirls on the water’s surface, partnering in a brisk salsa. I take a moment to marvel, then brace, anticipating the cold shock.

But I don’t hesitate. I raise my arms, cradling my head. I lean forward and dive in with grace and ease. I am pleased that my body remembers the leap I learned so long ago.

The cold flees almost as instantly as it strikes my skin and I am bathed in a deliciously refreshing cool. Ahhhh. I glide with a slow breaststroke, venture a few freestyle passes, all with my head out – I don’t want to bother with regulating my breath in and out of the water.

I roll on my back, absorb the softly lapping caresses, and bask in my good fortune.

I paddle towards my three salt-and-pepper-topped heads, my dear soul girlfriends who are bobbing about. My weekend with them is a most precious time.

I am filled with joy.

P52 Week 28 - Texture

The textures of our lives….

Last week my blog entry was about whining and whingeing. This week, I am eating humble pie.

For many years I have been involved with One to One Women Coaching Women, http://onetoonewomen.org/ a nonprofit whose mission statement is to assist women emerging from challenging circumstances to achieve their life goals. I’ve served in many capacities: on the board; as Director of Coach Services; helping to develop training manuals and supervision modules, as well as coaching a number of clients. As you can see by my involvement, I believe whole-heartedly in what One to One wants to accomplish: changing the world, one woman at a time.

More recently One to One has begun a program to provide coaching for a specific group of women: the caregivers of wounded veterans. I have helped to provide trauma training and mentoring for the volunteer coaches in order to better prepare them to serve this special group of clients.

These young wives care for their veteran husbands with a wide range of disabilities: amputations, paralysis and chronic pain. Most of them suffer from PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) and many of them from TBI (traumatic brain injury.)

These women deal with their veterans when they have flashbacks, when they have blackouts and when they get violent. When the vets have TBI that causes memory loss, their wives remind them – often hundreds of times a day. They advocate for their men by dealing with the problematic and frustrating VA system with all its unresponsiveness and flaws. In addition, many of these women have young children to care for and, astonishingly, hold down jobs and provide support for other veteran wives as well.

These caregivers care for their men day in and day out. They do not have a limited tour of duty – theirs is a life-long commitment. They are the unsung heroes of our military.

Their lives are hardly what they imagined and what they bargained for when they fell in love and said “I do…. through sickness and in health.”

Despite the challenges, these caregivers persevere with devotion.

With coaching, these women find an ally with whom they can share deeply – often for the first time. They feel understood and fully listened to. Their coaches provide a forum for exploring self-care, for problem solving and for planning ahead. Our One to One coaches are providing a safe place for these caregivers: a sanctuary where they are listened to; where they can share their joys, angsts and sorrows; where they can develop and practice coping skills; where they can formulate their dreams and plans.

I feel honored to mentor such amazing coaches.

And I am humbled: compared to what these caregivers of veterans are dealing with, I have little to whinge about.

The abundant textures of our lives…. 

P52 Week 27 - Photographer's Choice - Whingeing

Whinge, whinge, whinge. I love that verb! Learned it from my Aussie friends some years ago and it’s so much more expressive, conveys so much more than “complain,” “bitch” or “whine.”

I sometimes give into and indulge in a pity party. How about you? Recently, I’ve been whingeing about the stalled effort to publish my memoir.

You know that famous line from the Kevin Costner movie, Field Of Dreams: build it and they will come? Well, it isn’t true – not for me.

Write it and they will publish? Ha! Maybe I haven’t put it out there enough, but dang, the field of dreams was in the middle of nowhere – in rural Iowa for heck’s sake – and out of the blue, the people came. Why aren’t I having a better response to my manuscript?

I’m pouting and peevish and whining – and yes, whingeing.

But it doesn’t move me forward.

What are the next steps in getting my memoir out there? Research more agents. Hire a formal editor to whip the manuscript into shape. Build a platform – all those out-there things that intimidate my introverted personality: Facebook, Twitter, Podcasts, newsletters, lectures. Exhausting and scary!

I’m not ready to move on all that, not by a long shot.

So, I’ll luxuriate in a tub of bubbly bellyaching, bemoaning and bitching – for a while. And I’ll be gentle with myself.

Then I’ll rinse myself off and climb out. I’ll get over the whingeing and I’ll take my next step.

P52 Week 26 - Photographer's Choice: Three Good Things

THREE GOOD THINGS

Over the past several weeks I have been drawn to deepen my spiritual practice. Finding out about Three Good Things has been a welcome synchronicity.

Last week I attended the Group Health Permanente quarterly coaches meeting, made up of a group of clinicians who provide communication and leadership coaching within the organization. I have been associated with Group Health for many years: over twenty years practicing internal medicine and family medicine, and more recently as a coach consultant. At the meeting I learned that Group Health is expanding more into wellbeing and one of the videos we were shown, created by the Duke University Patient Safety Center was about Three Good Things. Bite Sized Resilience: Three Good Things

The Duke video outlines a simple technique for increasing resilience and decreasing burnout. It is based on the research of Martin Seligman – the originator of the Positive Psychology movement – which showed how using the Three Good Things technique created improvement in subjects that was “better than Prozac.” Duke introduced Three Good Things for the medical housestaff as an aid to prevent burnout. Their results confirm Seligman’s study, and show significant improvement in wellbeing and resilience when done for just two weeks with benefits continuing for over six months after discontinuing the practice.

As I sat through the Duke video, I thought back to my medical residency training days many years ago and how I had felt so emotionally constrained, bound up as if in a straightjacket. I was overwhelmed most of the time. How wonderful it would have been to have known about Three Good Things!

The technique is deceptively simple and might even seem somewhat hokie:

Two hours before retiring in the evening – research has shown that this is the best time to retain information – think about or jot down the answer to these questions:

What went well today? Name three good things.

For each good thing, what was your role in making it happen?

And what is the positive emotion that best fits how this good thing made you feel?

For my own use, with my training in neurobiology and somatic psychology, I have added a body sensation piece to the practice, anchoring the positive emotion in my body. I ask the additional question:

What is the physical sensation of this positive emotion?

The simplicity of this technique does not take away from its value. I believe that practices such as Three Good Things are important, not just for our wellbeing and those around us; they add to the positivity in the collective world consciousness. They are world work, and much needed in our current global atmosphere that is over-peppered with negativity.