Just a quick note in advance of posting a full entry shortly.
While this runs painfully afoul of my compulsion to tell the long version of even stories that don’t have one, I’m going to keep this short.
I have been going through a sort of generalized system malfunction. Essentially, after a lifetime of being run wrong and run ragged, my little machine is all out of sorts. That is a major problem. I became aware of it at the end of last summer but only felt it and fully understood it in the past couple months.
Fixing the problem is my single highest priority in life right now. That is not a small task. It requires not just changing things in my life but changing my entire orientation towards living my life and then changing anything and everything that doesn’t align with that new orientation.
Soooo, just, ya know, a wholesale rewrite on how I do this ‘living’ thing… while doing this living thing.
I’ll share the story behind all of this someday. For now, it is enough to just share the gist:
My brain and body are used to running in a state of red alert from having had to do so for too long. While we’re supposed to operate in that mode only rarely - and even then, only briefly – Red Alert has just been my Operating Mode for so long, they are truly one in the same.
That’s not good.
Operating in a state of high-stress, high-alert, high-alarm, is taxing on our bodies and systems even when brief and infrequent. Operating in that state routinely and persistently fucks things up six ways to Sunday.
Among the ways: normalizing of ‘fight-or-flight mode’ as just ‘regular ol’ walking around mode’ messes up the dials and sliders the body usually uses to toggle from one to the other.
Operate in a state of dysregulation long enough, you mess up the regulator.
For the last 15 years but for most of my life to some degree, I have been operating with a baseline stress-response level close to what a person should spike only when in danger. My systems were running super hot on adrenaline and cortisol like needing to fight a bear was an hourly thing. My entire body’s physiologic normal was ‘Mayday, as Monday.’
That is very un-good. I didn’t even feel it… until I started to change it… and then I was like “Dude, how did that ever feel normal?”
It did. It shouldn’t have. It can’t any longer.
The remedy is to swing hard towards an ultra-stable opposite of ‘red alert’… to go full Big Buddha and the Zenny-Zen All-Stars. To get out of the hurricane; move some place without them; and then sit either under a bodhi tree or on your sofa mindful as shit and saying things to your 17-year old son like “You will be able to locate the Lucky Charms when you accept that you cannot. The finding is in the not seeking.”
You have to really lean in on the whole-life Zen re-do.
If you do that - if you reorient around a new baseline of calm, stable, low alert - your body will adapt back towards the normal Operating Mode it had to move away from and then run on so long, it couldn’t reset.
So, I’m doing that… and it is an ADJUSTMENT. It is a whole array of adjustments. I’m making them. I’m getting used to them, and they take some getting used to…
In the meantime, there is one particularly vexing remaining element of the hyper-alarm system that has been getting in the way:
While I’ve been making this comprehensive effort to shift away from running in red alert mode – or needing to – the toggle between the new, healthy, ‘Standard Operating Mode’ and the old ‘Red Alert as Standard Operating Mode’ is still balky and sensitive.
If I put myself in a high-distress, high-dysfunction situation, it throws the entire machine back into Red Alert which impedes everything from writing to digestion to sleep and then takes days to re-regulate. If I walk back into some old hurricane for even a couple hours, it takes three days for my digestion to re-regulate. I never even noticed the impact before. Now I can’t not feel it.
That over-sensitive trigger that reactivates Red Alert Mode will desensitize as the new healthy Standard Operating Mode takes hold; but in the meantime, I have to be disciplined as hell about keeping hurricane-level stressful shit outside the walls of The Big Buddha Home and Lodge.
That is the one area where I have fallen down this month.
I have been knocking it out of the park on re-orienting my whole life away from running on perpetual high alert. I’ve been changing or retiring old habits and practices - and adding healthy new ones. I planned my work, and I’m working my plan.
The one area where I haven’t been as militant as I need to be is in removing myself from situations that are automatic hurricanes. I’ve walked back into the wind thinking I wouldn’t get swept up in the swirl… and then I have.
It has taken a few reminders to realize that managing your own peace means being mindful of the access you give to things that disturb it. Leave doors wide open, you’re welcoming in the wind. I’m learning to be a better bouncer.
I just want to be at peace and in peace.
I just want to write unimpeded, uninterrupted.
I need a place of calm as the norm for that to happen, and I am building one.
I just had to do the wee thing of changing my whole approach to life first…
I lived in a hurricane for so long, my systems lost the ability to run any other way.
I’m fixing that.
I’m getting there.
I’m so close…
I have an entry coming later this eve. Behind it, I have six more teed up on my desktop in various states of completion, and have still others outlined in notes.
The hold up since my last post was getting swept up in old hurricanes. That has been my mistake. It threw my system back into the impeding old Red Alert - which feels terrible now. I won’t keep repeating that mistake.
I’m battening down the place and learning to better manage the door.
I’m learning.
It takes time. I wish it didn’t. I wish I could just rush to where this is going.
Sometimes you just have to walk without worrying though.
The finding is in the not seeking, ya know.
"I just want to be at peace and in peace."
Allowing ourselves the simplest of emotions shouldn't be such a difficult ask. It's distressing how unnecessarily hard we are on our ourselves and own basic needs.
Meanwhile, I petition to adopt "mindful as shit" as my new mantra. I'm just gonna carry a pocket full of glitter around and sprinkle it on people stealing my joy while whispering "mindful as shit, baby."
You can do it! My adrenal system stayed in fight or flight mode into my 60’s. The cause is a textbook story that I no longer stew over. A good therapist helped me regulate.