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I have a hard time with transitional periods in my life because of the staleness of them. It’s the time in between things, milestones that I find the most challenging; the silence of them always seems to be the most deafening to me.
I was laid off recently and decided to go on a month-long pilgrimage, knowing I would feel restless. But also hoping that it would help me transition adventurously and gracefully out of this chapter of my career into the next — whatever that may be!
I found the first month of my partial unemployment (I’m still wrapping up projects) particularly uncomfortable, to say the least. What’s been interesting is that the discomfort hasn’t come from being laid off — I’ve sweated out the illusion and self-imposed shame of failure in a million vinyasa yoga classes years ago when I was going through my divorce.
It’s more been my restlessness.
I’ve been working non-stop since I was 17. I was always the one who took the additional assignment, the one who worked after hours, worked while going to school full-time — sometimes even working two jobs. Most of the time it had nothing to do with the money, I just loved to work and to work hard. I used to say that other people might be smarter, more skilled or talented, but no one would work as hard. And I was generally right.
So you can imagine how this first month of my unemployment has been. Everyone around me has told me to chill the fuck out and to enjoy it. And I desperately have been trying to, practicing yoga all day, going to the spa, binge watching all the television I’ve been behind on. But it has been torturous, quieting my brain to stop from planning and worrying about what’s next. It has been an active practice; it is ironically one of the most challenging things for me to do — this act of doing nothing.
Sitting still is one of the staples of Buddhist meditation. The wonderful Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh writes in his pocket edition of his essential teachings (page 15), “You should allow your body and your mind to rest. Our mind as well as our body need to rest. The problem is that not many of us know how to allow our body…
