Filling the Empty Cup with an Eye Dropper

Funny thing about the notion of self care.  It seems to be out there everywhere.  It's splashed all over social media as THE thing to do.  The metaphorical refilling of the empty cup slowly drained in response to the stressors of life so that you can help others. 

What is self care anyway? Is it something where we participate in, an activity that gracefully fills our empty cup with gentle flowing water like a glorious waterfall to achieve balance with the rest of our lives and bring our soul into center? Or is it really more of a self preservation measure done in fits and spurts when the world becomes so heavy we just simply shut down until we can hurriedly find that proverbial eye dropper to put just a few drops in the empty cup so we can keep going just a little while longer, a quick mani here, a quick pedi there.... 

I gotta be honest. I really resemble the eye dropper.  I work on the road every other week, 6 days on, ten hours at a time, often on the other coast suffering from jet lag on both ends of the trip, with the weeks in between working a second job in occupational medicine and at times a third job doing telemedicine.  I have demanding teenagers and adult children. The 5 humans I am raising who tend to need their mom in totally different, albeit fairly complex ways than they did when they were younger.  Gone are the days a bag of goldfish and a juice box fixed all that was wrong in their worlds.  It's a lot.  ALL THE TIME.  

Last week was the week of my father's funeral.  Life was heavy and harder than usual.  I decided to stare down the proverbial elephant in the room and admit there really wasn't a quick eye dropper fix to my seemingly empty cup.  It wasn't like a manicure on the fly was going to do it, so I committed to the Peloton Self Care Retreat.  A week of classes including yoga and meditation.  I suppose I had some romanticized idea that I would come away, refreshed, renewed and most importantly, having all the answers to life's questions that seem to plague my every thought.  

As I dug into the yoga portion of the retreat one thing was for sure.  My mind was not quiet.  Trying to focus and breathe was a chore in and of itself let alone hold my balance, while all the issues I am trying to solve swirled around in my mind like a roaring tornado.  The coaches repeated,"sometimes the tensions feel loud in the poses,"  Sometimes? For me it was all the time.  The coach said," this loudness is your mind telling you that you have to attend something.  You don't."  Herein lies the problem, my never ending drive to attend to all things all at once when what I really needed to do was let myself off the hook for a bit.

During the classes, each time I gave myself permission to quiet the tension, I started to sense little drops dripping into, what I would discover, my bone dry, dusty, empty, cobweb filled cup.  Now, there were moments I wobbled out of a pose frustrated that I didn't have it perfectly, as if somehow throughout the course of a week I was to become some magical yogi.  The instructors reminded me though, every fall is not a failure, rather it is an opportunity to start again, this time aiming for something new.  The meditation phase was the perfect partner to the idea of something new.  It was all about creating a new self narrative to have a direction forward. For me that word became ambition.  Coming back to that touch point over and over to where I became convinced there was something new I needed to reach for in the future. 

In the end, you may ask if this was a glorious rebirth and did I come away refreshed with a brand new plan to take on the world in a more balanced way with this overflowing glorious cup I couldn't wait to share?  Yeah.  No.  Those are Hollywood moments. In fact, things got a lot harder last week when my bank account was hacked, and through the freezing of the old account and the opening of a new account at a separate bank which has left me with no access to cash for 9 days and counting.  Then, there was the challenge of burying my father this past weekend who was taken for no good reason by COVID.  As I said before, fucking COVID.  

What I do know is this.  Hard things are going to happen, but ignoring a cobweb filled empty cup is not going to make things any easier.  Maybe I didn't come up with all the answers to the various issues I have on my plate at the moment with yoga and meditation, but I was able to fill my cup and handle the hard things better and give myself one very important thing.  Grace.  Grace to know I don't have to attend to every hard thing every minute of the day.  Today,  the tension is not as loud and I know in my heart of hearts despite all the falling out of the proverbial poses as of late, I still have opportunity and ambition to create something new even if I don't have all the answers.  I think its time for me to throw away my slow cup filling eye dropper to make room for consistent meditation and mind slowing yoga to continue to snack on the proverbial good health elephant.  Why?  Because as I quoted Desmond Tutu before, and will again, "There is only one way to eat an elephant, a bite at a time."