On October 30, 2024, it's my mom's birthday, and I'm looking forward to making dinner for her: some beef stroganoff that my dad used to make for us, and having a little birthday party for her this afternoon.
I normally eat whole plant vegan, because in my experience this seems to be what my body loves the most, and today I went off the usual track. I got $45 worth of meat yesterday at the grocery store for this beef stroganoff, and I'm looking forward to making that today.
Losing 18 games to 1, and the criticism in my head
I played tennis with a friend this morning that I hadn't played with before, and he won 18 games to my one. Wow, this was the most challenging spiritual practice I've had lately, because my mind was going in with all the criticism. You hit that shot, what a crappy shot. You're a bad tennis player. Your serve sucks. Your backhand's weak. And all of this negative talk, like, no, I hate this, and I'm frustrated.
And then he recommended I read this book called The Inner Game of Tennis. Wow. I'm loving this book, and it basically encourages you to just relax and play the game and look at it like you're learning something, like playing tennis the same way a child learns how to walk. The child falls down and gets back up and falls down and plays around and tries all these different ways of walking until the child gets a good way of walking that consistently works, and gets back up and plays around. And then they start learning to run and dance and swim. It's a joyful, playful process. It's completely unlike the way a lot of us learn things as adults, with the criticism and trying to find a way to do it perfect.
Saying yes to this moment
I took a tennis lesson yesterday, and today my tennis game, I was trying to match the lesson to how I was actually playing. And there were a lot of shots that didn't go in today. And I kept just saying yes, yes to this moment. Yes to this moment. To me, the most powerful basic spiritual practice is to say yes to this moment.
I love that I'm learning how to play tennis, and I'm so excited to see what my body can do. I respect my body, that it does so many incredible things that I can't even comprehend how it does all the stuff it does. And literally all I need to do is just let it do its thing lots of times. It's up to me to put it in a certain position. Once I get it on a tennis court, it can play tennis, and it doesn't really need me to do anything. It knows what to do, and it will learn how to do it.
A runny nose as another form of crying
I had a great conversation with my sponsor in AA last night as well, as I did with my massage therapist. Yesterday I talked to my massage therapist about a little bit of my childhood traumas, and I then felt kind of yucky after the massage. Then I started sneezing, right before I was going to take my son to his hip hop dance class. And then my nose just started draining, just running. I filled up several Kleenexes and then an entire handkerchief with water from my nose.
I look at that now as the equivalent of crying. That if I am not able to be teared up, my body will alternatively release through a runny nose. And what I do today is I focus on getting the runny nose out. Blow it out. I used to suck it back up all the time, and that would lead to a stuffed nose. And then a stuffed nose would snowball into fear of being sick and all these stories. And today, in my experience, I haven't been sick in two years. And one reason, I've come to believe, is because of this new process of dealing with feelings and emotions.
I told my sponsor about this and he said, that's amazing, I've never heard of that before. That crying, if you have a runny nose, is another form of crying. It biologically is very close to crying, except it's coming out the nose, and the nose and the tear ducts and stuff are all connected. And I'm grateful that that's the story I tell myself now. So whenever I have a runny nose, I interpret it as I'm having some kind of emotional or physical release that my body's cutting loose from something. And then I never have any of these other symptoms, or I don't get sick or snowball into these other things, because it's just a particular thing my body's doing.
I love sharing about these things, because I take them for granted now. They're my normal working beliefs. But at one point, they were an amazing learning that hadn't happened before. And I'm very grateful. That's why, after my sponsor's response last night, I thought, I need to make sure to share this in my diary today.
I'm looking forward to going to my AA meeting tonight and having my mom's birthday. If you enjoy these everyday reflections, you can watch more of them in my Life playlist, and this same gratitude for losing on the court shows up again in Tennis, Psychic Change, and the Wealth of Time.