Day 17: Let Go
I’m actually interrupting the regular 40 EM scheduled programming for today’s Let Go post because something so SPOT on happened to me the other night. I’m always teaching from the Real Life Wild of my real life, so here’s today’s lesson on Letting Go, brought to you by my oldest kid (and recently published on my Substack, if you’re not over there already - here’s the link!).
___
Change hurts.
Like, actually hurts.
Sometimes? Often? Probably all the time, at least a little bit?
Ok, I’ll go on record and say: if you are changing, it probably hurts a little, at least a little bit, for at least some of the time.
There’s a name for this:
Growing pains.
My kids are juuuuuust old enough now (and this a recent phenomenon, like in the last 8 months or so) where we all pretty much sleep through the night every night.
(If you’re playing along at home that means I spent about 6.5 years being anywhere from mildly to severely sleep deprived 🫡)
Unless someone is up vomiting (& we’ve had 2 stomach bugs in the last 8 months, but who’s counting? 😭), I can pretty much guarantee that we’re all going to sleep through the night.
And THAT feeling is worth 1,000,000 trillion zillion bucks!
So I was utterly disoriented last night when I woke up and my husband was not in bed & I realized our youngest was wailing. I walked into the kids’ room & my husband was utterly confused too, because we don’t do this anymore!
Turns out the kid was having a nightmare & we got him settled & all was well.
… Until some unspecified amount of time later (I wasn’t looking at the clock in all my confusion, I just knew it was somewhere in the vast middle of the night), I woke up again and once again my husband was not in bed.
He shortly came back in saying that our older kid had now woken up. Possibly with a nightmare as well, but absolutely with pain in his legs.
Now this had happened before, and I don’t remember this from my own childhood, but my husband does from his. The same thing exactly: waking up in the middle of the night with legs hurting. It seems to specifically be like … shin pain?
I do seem to remember when our older kid broke his leg at age 3, the doctor called it “the toddler fracture” and that these shin bones (of which there are 2? Don’t quote me. I can’t name them) are just raaaaaapidly growing in childhood & pretty fragile.
All to say: my kid woke up in the middle of the night with LITERAL growing pains.
LITERAL GROWING PAINS! 😮
It just blew my mind and confirmed everything I see & experience myself on the inner landscape — cause that’s the only growing I’m doing these days — (In fact I’m probably already starting to shrink but that’s an essay for another day!):
Change hurts!
Even good change (sometimes especially the good change)!
Whenever we step away from safe, familiar, comfortable patterns, habits, jobs, places, relationships, you name it — even if we know they are “bad” for us / no longer work — we still experience growing pains!
I’ve said it a million times & I’ll keep saying it: my kids are some of my best teachers. Not really with what they say, just by who they are.
Simply from what I observe about them. And what they show me (so fresh & unjaded!) about being human. And especially how they challenge me and push my limits of patience and stretch my already stretched capacity for handling shit.
So I’m already like — wow! — stunned (& slightly incoherent) in the middle of the night by this confirmation that growing pains are real but what comes next just Blows. My. Mind.
My kids asks me to lay with him in bed. I tell him the Tylenol will kick in soon & I can’t wait to measure him in the morning because I bet he’s grown at least an inch tonight!
And then he turns to me and says: “Mom, my brain won’t stop having this thought over and over again, even though I know it’s not true, I can’t stop having it.”
Now, I’m a meditation teacher & a coach by profession. I work with people’s thoughts all day. Adult’s thoughts!
And 9 adults out of 10 who I work with will have some level of their own mind’s blown when we get to the part where I say to them:
“Number one, YOU are not your thoughts. Your thoughts are not YOU. And number two, you don’t have to believe everything you think!”
🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯
Most adults are just flabbergasted by this!
“What do you mean I’m not my thoughts? Who am I then? And wait, oh thank God! Really? I don’t have to believe everything I think?!?”
I get it! I forgot this ALL the time! It’s so easy to get consumed by what we think! Especially the “greatest hits” of the stories we tell ourselves again and again and again!
The “I’m a lousy soccer player” thought that we say to ourselves at age 9 gets set on repeat until we think that we actually ARE a lousy soccer player and quit the team. And eventually, like a bad game of telephone, the thought gets transformed into “I’m just pretty lousy, aren’t I?”
Or whatever the non-benign version of this for you is! (Like really; I’ll pause here. You fill in your own blanks!)
So like any mom, I of course think my kids are pretty special.
But I also know they’re not THAT special.
If they can recognize their own higher Self apart from the ego with a whole lotta ease in the middle of the night, I gotta believe there’s hope for me too. And probably for you too! Maybe even for all of us.
So let’s all repeat together:
“I am not my thoughts.”
And
“I don’t have to believe everything I think.”
Wait for it…
🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯
Wow. What a concept!
And not only a concept, but a revolution. Because when we can recognize & accept these twin facts, we can avoid turning pain (inevitable) into suffering (arguably, avoidable when the culprit is our own damn mind on repeat!).
So I say to my kid, “Ok baby. Do you want to tell me the thought you keep having even though you know it isn’t true? Just so you can get it out of your head & I can carry it for you so you can fall back asleep tonight?”
He turns to me, straight faced and says:
“Well, I just keep thinking that this pain in my legs is your fault because you gave birth to me.”
🫠🫠🫠🫠🫠🫠🫠🫠🫠🫠🫠🫠🫠🫠🫠
I mean — not wrong, baby, not wrong. And also, not true.
And we all fell right back to sleep ☺️
see you right back here tomorrow,
Cath
Meditation: Today, we move from emotions to thoughts. The purpose of meditation isn’t to totally wipe our minds clean of thoughts (the nature of our mind is to think, after all!). But to come into right relationship with what we find on our minds. To create just enough space and distance between our thoughts (and our habituated reactions and storylines to them!). Because my mind is a BUSY place, today’s 15-minute meditation may very well be my favorite in all of 40 EM. Give it a go and let me know in the comments how it went for you!
Reflection: What's a thought you can't stop having even though you know it's not true?