Baby Got Bounce

I was proud of myself for walking away today. I excused myself from my After School curriculum planning meeting so I could be on time for the Inner Resilience workshop for teachers that my Most Precious Colleagues encouraged me to sign up for. (Sometimes it's hard to act selfish when you feel that other people are counting on you. But it's an important skill to practice. )

I'd been thinking I was all tough and hard and impervious, fossilizing and petrifying from the inside out. But the minute the lights were dimmed and the voice on the mediation CD came on saying "Be still and listen," I was blubbering like a leaky roof on a rainy day. N--'s name was etched in my head and my heart. I hadn't yet let myself feel this loss. And I realized, on the inside, though perhaps I've grown a thin, egg-like shell, I'm still made mostly of marshmallow fluff.

Here's the reading from the workshop. Do with it what you will:

There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence...[and that is] activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence.

To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence.

The frenzy of our activism neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fuitfulness of our own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes our work fuitful.

-Thomas Merton

"To surrender to too many demands..."

Makes me wonder why it's so much easier to listen to everyone else's demands than it is to hear your own.

When your job is to take care of others, it is easy to forget to take care of yourself.