#midfullness

Soy especialista en sueño y no, no sé que significa que un gato te salga en tus sueños, ni el significado de las flores o que número debes de jugar para ganarte la lotería. 

Todos los días debo de explicarles a las personas sobre el por qué debemos de dormir, cómo sino no lo hacemos nuestro cuerpo y cerebro se dañan y sobre todo convencer a mis pacientes de que deben de cambiar sus malos hábitos para poder dormir mejor. Pero, por qué malos hábitos?

A ver... responda las siguientes preguntas:

Se duerme usted a la misma hora siempre? Se levanta a la misma hora? Duerme entre 6 y 8 horas por noche? Come mucho antes de dormir o decide esperar un tiempo? Ve su celular, ipad, computadora o televisor antes de dormir o los utiliza para dormirse? Si su respuesta fue afirmativa a cualquiera de mis preguntas... usted mi amigo tiene mala higiene del sueño.

Lo que más me gusta del sueño es todo el proceso que nuestro cerebro realiza para poder regenerarse y lograr que nuestro cuerpo descanse. Sin embargo, con nuestros malos hábitos, me incluyo, después de todo son las 10:40 pm y estoy haciendo tareas de la universidad y probablemente me acueste muy tarde, lo único que hacemos es hacerle esa tarea más difícil a nuestro pobre y cansado cerebro.

Podría escribir muchísimas cosas sobre el sueño, pero lo que más me gusta es ver la increíble capacidad que tienen nuestros cerebros, toda esa infinidad de acciones, voltajes, ideas y destellos que se dan en milisegundos para que podamos por ejemplo sonreír.  Y cómo nos cuesta a las mentes ansiosas apagar ese cerebro que en las madrugadas nos dice... y que hubiera pasado? o el terrible... te faltó algo por hacer? y nunca falta el: dejaste algo prendido en la cocina? 

Lograr despejar nuestra mente antes de dormir nos permite alcanzar estados de mayor relajación y eso representa descansar mejor, pero cómo logramos apagar nuestra ansiedad? 

Una manera, la más concreta y sencilla, es la meditación, dónde logramos concentrar nuestra conciencia en ideas o situaciones de calma y tranquilidad. Podemos hacerlo a través del mindfullnes, las respiraciones guidas o el whitenoise, entre otros. No es fácil lograrlo y hacer de estas técnicas un hábito, pero podemos intentarlo, nos tomará en promedio unas tres semanas lograr que la rutina se establezca en nuestra vida. 

Así que te aconsejo lo siguiente si quieres mejorar tus hábitos del sueño:

Así que mi pregunta hoy para vos es: dime como duermes y te diré quién eres...

YOGA! I have discovered the beauty of yoga just a few months ago. Ever since, I can not go a day without it. Many many just think that while doing yoga, you aren't really getting in a good workout but trust me... I feel rejuvenated and better than I ever had before. Not only does yoga help you become more flexible, but it really helps you tone up your body and clear your mind. Just by doing thirty minutes of yoga a day, you will begin to see and feel a difference in not only your strength but also in your emotional well being. A great way to get started is by watching some videos and following along. I personally recommend checking out Yoga With Adriene on YouTube. 

The princess came crashing down into a new world, a comet from the depths of space, she was full to the brim from places she had travelled through, all the sights and sounds coursed through her. A voyager inside the meat, another passenger. She surveyed what she saw bleary eyed, it was familiar but at the same time so strange, the people spoke in a language she didn’t understand, she was afraid.

There was a house, through the city, down a never ending street that seemed to only change slightly, “is this it?” she thought. She was in an uncanny world that seemed to endlessly repeat itself, sometimes shop fronts would be galleries, she tugged at the straps of her bulging backpack, sweating profusely under her cumbersome layers, frantically checking her google maps to check she really was supposed to continue going straight, eternal, eternally down the same road.

But of course it changes, like life always does and she found herself suddenly on budding leafy streets, in front of ‘no fire no glory’, how fitting she chuckled to herself silently. She met the girl, she got the key, with trepidation and excitement she found her front door, tucked between a bakery and an ice cream shop, a sweet new world, all painted in pastel yellows, across the street was a park, a playground, children tumbling everywhere, home.

The weeks that followed moved through so many peaks and dips, a loophole, a dark room nestled away from the sunshine, a man utterly at ease with himself sitting at a laptop, she stands at the bar, they are both paused, after some time ‘do you need anything?’.

Yes.

The house of world culture, a beacon sat proudly on the edges of a garden, of one of the many she would roll through. A night she anticipated greatly that scared and excited her, she was harassed by a meat man who would not leave her alone and saved by a young german prince, who was overcome, in the toilets she thanked him, it was the second time in 2 weeks, she was not totally afraid but she was rattled, worried it would become the trend. But then there was smoke and flashing lights and everything sunk away in a flurry of sound.

She escaped to her loophole, there she found the berlin bear, not immediately but the bear swept her up and she let him, she let him guide her and she let him enter her little yellow house and introduce her to herself.

She was lonely and she wasn’t sure how to ground herself in this new world, a stranger still despite forming new relationships and cementing older ones with kindness and good will. Finding people she’d only knew round the edges to be full of light.

But at night she would close her door and be scared, almost breathless, afraid she would be expelled and never find footing in this city, it was always shaky ground beneath her feet, on a border, sitting on her balcony wondering how she could go back, feeling like she could never go back, feeling like she’d rather hurl herself off a building than return empty handed. This journey was her plight, her attempt to rearrange the mottled mess that she had built around her into some kind of semblance of a hospitable place.

The bear, was the only new constant, a whirlwind formed around them, an intense and almost terrifying passion filled her and suddenly she was amplified, finding her body in strangers across the city, waking up in a spectrum of beds, almost as an aside to the bear, as a way of entertaining them both.

Its as if the princess detached, like an iceberg split in twain, somewhere she was above this disaster watching the pair float in opposite directions, both slowly melting in a sea of poison and unrest, a job, a big step but in the heat and stench of a restless night, intoxicated hurtling to a bureau to a sunflower, like a bee.

The Sun: the illusive light that penetrated but she could never turn to find, was starting to pour into her life and at first she didn’t know how to perceive the illumination that opened up all the cracks of her mind. Seeing things she had never seen before, finding erotic places on herself she had never really considered part of her, places on her body that were suddenly charming where once they had been grotesque.

Singing, night after night, alone in her room, in between the spells of near insanity, inside a closet of loneliness that only ebbed but never receded, still afraid.

A handsome grey haired man she’d met on Friday night and had kissed her before she slung herself into a taxi walked past her that same Sunday strolling neatly with his bicycle and his girlfriend, he gave her such a heartwarming smile, it healed in its kindness. Sat in her garden of eden on a monument looking out over manicured gardens as the sun hung in the sky, slowly lowering itself to bed.

The boy she let in that left right away, scared by the fire that was burning inside her as she attempted to translate everything that was suddenly alive in her.

Then the bear, the last time she let him in her house, which she prepared so carefully but still couldn't impress him with, the woman she couldn’t be because she didn’t know how to be, because she never was and never would be, though that woman was the shadow that she lived with, an amalgamation of what she had been and someone she had never met. He left and she utterly lost herself, the last residual elements of her splintered and shattered.

A crash and then a cascade of men and self destruction followed, in 2 weeks she magnified, she suddenly flew through them, sandwich to substance abuse to bed after bed after bed, some she slept in others she ran from, full of something she refused to face.

The princess is gone now.

She had to leave.

But she didn’t die, she woke one morning full of pain and there in the background another princess was being made, a bed she couldn’t remember a man she didn’t know, a night she had no recollection of, an ornate vase splayed on the floor, mud and detritus cast around it, a plant, unhinged.

“That was me wasn’t it?”

A hot mad day, singing about her suicide, crying out to the neighbours that had viewed her wreckage, aghast, just far enough out of sight to not recognise, but there. Wandering the streets, wretching inside as if possessed, no longer caring who she met or what she did as long as the path was to oblivion, tweeting insanities, writhing and seething and lashing out.

She woke again and it felt like death surrounded her, blood, glass and splinters. Then to an island and into the sun, it awakened something inside her and she said farewell to the vessel, to the meat, she clutched its hands and she told it softly, it is not in the folds of hierarchy that you will find yourself, it is in the blue of the lapping water and the never ending sky, you are not looking to become, you are looking to be, look to the moon, let yourself finally be saved, let that teabag once dropped by another man you could of loved but never could of reached be your guide.

Breathe Deep.

The meat watched another passenger depart.

The meat sighed.

The meat saw that the future was still there, it was faint but it was hers, to find it she had to cross herself and during that journey to forgive everything, to find love and nurture and sweetness, to remember that her door was nestled between an ice cream shop and a bakery for a reason.

She is in the sun now, it keeps finding her, and she has found her garden of Eden, its not private property after all, anyone can go there, it’s in bloom, it is the setting of the salvation she has so restlessly wished for. There is a reason she came here but she was carrying the wrong totem.

Everything is blue, it reminds her of the moomins and it brings her back into contact with WOMAN. A different WOMAN, a WOMAN woven in to the lives of men now to, she doesn't want to type another caps lock woman again, you get the picture.

I remember the moomins, I remember the garden, I remember waking up and feeling good in the morning. I am still lonely but I am less afraid and my loneliness is not hurting me anymore, because the actor that plays it is me and I want to remember everything, not hide from it anymore.

I am not Catherine.

Or the unicorn.

Or courtney.

Or the mermaid.

I am here and I am now and I am practising taking it in and being grateful, the sun is rising in my life, I can walk in it now, I am healing.

I am here and I am now.

I’ve been eating a lot of carrots and thinking about Miss Honey, who went to the trouble of peeling and cutting hers before she had them as a snack, now I follow her lead.

"Mindfulness is the aware, balanced acceptance of present experience. It isn't more complicated than that."

Sylvia Boorstein