Today has been a very good day. I participated in another wonderful retreat at the East Bay Meditation Center in Oakland. It’s really a wonderful thing to experience your heart opening. I think sometimes we walk around in very self-protective modes–armored and “safe” but disconnected from the rest of the world. Today’s workshop, titled “Free Your Heart A Transformational Workshop for Exploring Love & Connection” allowed multiple opportunities for participants to open our hearts to experience the power of connecting with one another. It provided one of those experiences that keeps giving for hours and sometimes days after the session ends. The activities and exercises were simple and profound in drawing us out of ourselves and into greater communion with the people around us. I am grateful to have been fully present for the retreat. It is another of many EBMC retreats and classes I’ll be participating in in the weeks ahead.
Today I found myself in a small group recounting to them a brief history of the past year. What really struck me about my own sharing was the recognition I have about how much I’ve achieved in the past several months. When I lost my job and subsequently my health insurance back in March, I was no longer able to afford the anti-depressant medications that I had depended on to keep me on a relatively even keel through seriously stressful and toxic work environments. I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to “make it” without my meds, but the circumstances forced me to figure out how to do just that. In the subsequent months I have been able to more than hold my own against the turbulent storms of depression, and have at time felt incredibly good. I am relieved to no longer be taking med–I hated feeling like I had to depend on them to keep me on an even keel. So over the nearly six months from June until now I’ve developed very different ways of being in the world, taking steps in many new directions all with the objective of learning to face challenging life circumstances with a measure of grace and equanimity and to do it all without antidepressants.
Mindfulness meditation practice has become an important component to my growth since I began reading about the positive effects of mindfulness in working through depression (See The Mindful Way Through Depression by Williams, Teasdale, Segal, and Kabat-Zinn) and attending regular weekly sitting meditations and daylong retreats through EBMC. I have a long way to go toward developing consistency in my meditation practice, but I remain committed to working on it. I am grateful for the wonderful teachers I’ve experienced during my time at EBMC. They teach by example as well as from deep wisdom, extensive study and practice. They teach with great kindness, compassion, love and humor. It is a blessing simply to be in their presence. I want to be a teacher like that someday.
I am grateful that for the past 150 days I’ve found something that I am grateful for that is worth writing about. When I started this daily blog I had no idea how long I could sustain it, and there have been times, as I’ve acknowledge, when I haven’t felt inspired or haven’t written a very inspired post. But I have enjoyed and am enjoying this run, and so for a time, I will keep writing. I hope I don’t run out of things to say because there are so many things to be thankful for over the course of one day that to run out would be ridiculous. I look forward to continuing to chronicle my journey of gratitude and sharing those insights with you. In gratitude always.
© M. T. Chamblee, 2011
