Human Needs

Some thoughts on taking care of ourselves.

Basic Human Needs

Water-
By the time you are thirsty, you are probably already dehydrated.  Your body needs lots of water!

Signs of dehydration
Tiredness
Dry Skin
Headache
Constipation
Lightheadedness
Dry Mouth
Thirst

How much water daily?
Multiply your weight by .5 to find the baseline amount of water you need daily.
add 8 oz. to this total for every caffeineated beverage or soda you drink.  If you find plain water boring or difficult to drink in large amounts, check out the caffeine-free herbal tea selection at any grocery store.  There are many flavors to choose from, you can boil a cup or two of water, add several tea bags and steep, then add water and ice to make a gallon that is ready to drink from all day.

Food-
There is no one right diet plan for every body.  As a basic start, fill the bulk of your diet with whole foods, as unprocessed as possible.  Sugar, MSG, and white flour are at the top of my to-avoid list.  From there, be kind to yourself!  Pay attention to which foods make you feel terrible, and eliminate or greatly reduce those.  If you do want to indulge in one of those foods, take the time to sit down in a relaxed environment and slowly savor a small portion, noticing the smell, texture, and being very present with the taste through the whole experience.  If you want some help on how to get started with that concept, the Center for Mindful Living downtown offers mindful eating sessions, as do I.

Touch-
Human affection and connection are crucial to our well being.  Whether partnered or not make sure you accept affection from the other loved ones in your life, as well as from yourself.  This includes self-massage, and giving yourself the time to get a massage or other hands-on therapy, even if it is trading with a friend.  If possible, massage therapy and reflexology are great as well.

Attention-
It is important to feel that you have sources of healthy attention.  Practice deep attentive listening in your relationships to encourage that pattern between the two of you.  Also, meditation can be a wonderful way to sit down and fulfill this need for yourself, to observe your own thought stream with rapt attention.

Participation in community-
If you feel a lack in this area, there are may avenues to find a group of people that you can join.  Check meetup.com, Facebook groups that also meet in person, local events, faith based groups, volunteer groups and so on.  It can be difficult to find a good fit at first, but it is worth the effort.  Keep trying!  Look for people who are comfortable accepting you for who you are right now.

Guidance-
You may have wise and trusted older relatives or friends that can offer their wisdom.  If you do, lucky you!  If not, a religious leader in the community may be able to help with guidance.  However, the truest teacher is Within yourself.  Practice listening to your intuition, trusting the impressions you get, and acting on the needs you see in yourself.  Also, take a look at the book list in this packet for books I have found particularly helpful for guidance.  You may enjoy all, some or none!  Check the library self-help and spirituality sections for books more to your specific situation.

Altered states of consciousness-
In spite of what you may imagine when you see that phrase, what I am referring to is "transcending the ordinary" and accessing a deeper/higher type of awareness.  Mindfulness based practices can help, meditation, bodywork, and whatever it is for you that makes you feel blissful and timeless.

Healthy sexuality-
We are sexual beings, and are meant to maintain a balance of this aspect of our nature neither depriving ourselves or overindulging.  If you have tended toward deprivation, explore healthy outlets for your sexual energy.  If you have had little to no sex drive, spend some time investigating the causes, and supporting yourself in this area.  Whether partnered or not, women especially benefit greatly from regular solo self-love sessions.  If you tend towards overindulgence, support yourself in reflecting on why that might be so, and what you can do to bring balance.

Emotional balance-
Our emotions are an integral part of the human experience.  If you have a tendency to "stuff down" or ignore your feelings, consider some safe ways you can start to pay more attention to this part of your experience.  Whether you have been ignoring feelings or hanging on to them, even difficult feelings are temporary, experiencing them fully allows them to dissipate or integrate more readily.  Journaling,  talking to a counselor, meditation, inner child work and yoga therapy can all help.

Unconditional Love-
We all have a deep need to love and be loved.  A crucial piece of feeling fulfilled and loved is to actually begin to deeply love ourselves as individuals.  When you commit to listening to yourself, to doing what you need for your well being, that is a powerful path that will change your life.  Think of it like when you have a new romantic partner.  It seems so easy to love everything about that person, to overlook small flaws and to be impressed by simple things that make them who they are.  You feel exhilarated to do things for them, happy to find out what their wants and needs are so you can participate in fulfilling them.  In a similar way, if you begin to looking at yourself as a person worthy of ecstatic unconditional love, and start establishing habits accordingly, you may notice very real changes happening.  This shift can also lead to working on loving relationships you have with others, and all of these connections point to, and are part of, our connection to Divine.

Mothers' Day

Becoming a mother brings a new perspective of reality, a joining into a continuation of a pattern of relationship as old as humanity, a coming around the circle from being a child of a mother, to being that mother.  It is a relationship in which mother and child dance a primal dance together, grappling with what it means to be human. 

With great difficulty and love and amazement, we learn from one another, gudie each other as teacher and student simaltaneously.  It is a sacred experience, in that all of life is sacred, but the divine aspect is perhaps more than usually emphasized in the intimate role we play in the life of our mother, she in ours, we in the life of our child, they in ours. 

We are given a mantle of responsiblity, the weighty, joyous task of peering into the wide eyes of this little human and discerning what is needed, what inner passions exist, what potential lies within, what direction can we offer to help this person unfold.  In return that ancient-new wise-innocent gaze offers to show us day by day how to become the guide that is needed, offering moment by moment lessons in becoming a human worth being a leader, a mother. 

And in becoming a mother, we are able to look with great compassion and gratitude to the one who mothered us, and who mothered her, and her, back through the generations of humanity and know that each of us is doing the best we can from our level of understanding.

Accepting Love

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” ~ Rumi

 

In spite of being surrounded by other humans, a pervasive sense of loneliness seems to be a common human experience.  It can be frustrating to try to form deep connections that feel fulfilling, to feel like the other person sees who you are, and accepts you for that person.  In return, our own expectations and personal ideas about what love and true understanding look and feel like can keep us from seeing the love available to us.  Everyone has the same desire to love, to be loved.  Think about that.  If every person in your life feels the same ache of longing for love and understanding you do, what does that mean for our relationships?  I have been thinking about this idea, of working on learning to accept the love that people have to give, not the love I think they should give.  If I hold it against someone that they can't "love" me the way I expect them to, and in return if I close myself off to receiving the love they do offer, I am the one keeping myself from love, not the other person.  I am working right now at listening to myself as though I am my own beloved (because I am!), and if I struggle daily to give myself the kind of true love I want from someone else, how can I be surprised that I don't receive that love from others?  If I judge someone else and find something lacking in the level and quality of their love then perhaps what I am looking for is not something in them, but something in me that needs my own attention and love.  Love is patient.

The Nothing

I dreamed, and in my dream I thought

"It is the Nothing, only instead of being afraid and running from it, people are glad, and leaping into it."

Sometimes it can seem easier to give up and allow yourself to sink into despair.  That is not the path of least resistence, only a lie that tells you it is.  Working hard day after day at changing your life requires a lot of effort and can seem tiring, but that is a misunderstanding.  In the short term, giving up seems easy, but in the long term doing the work is the only way to avoid being devoured.  We are not meant to give ourselves over to destruction.  Transformation is possible, understanding is attainable, peace is one breath away.  

Challenge

 

I am capable of more.  Let's see how much.  Training begins now. 

Dream: The Festival

I have such long, vivid dreams and within the dreams there is a richness of detail and layers of memory and experience that I wake up feelin glike I have been somewhere else.  If anyone who reads this knows about dream interpretation, I am looking for a dream reader to teach me. 

Last night I was dreaming that it was the night before a small local festival. It was dark, and I was walking down the street with some friends.  There was a lot of traffic, and across the way I could see the houses preparing for the next day, one house was unfolding itself at the top, letting out a large well-designed porch for people to enjoy.  At the bottom of the embankment below the sidewalk, I saw rocks next to the street.  I'm always looking for rocks, and this time I saw a piece of green sea glass.  Almost as large as my palm, rectangular, smoothed and rounded on the edges.  I went down the embankment to pick it up, my friends wanted me to leave it because they thought traffic was dangerous, but I knew I would be safe.  When I got down to the street, a limo stopped and a wealthy young man opened the door and asked what I was doing.  I talked to him, and he offered to take me to the festival.  I told him I would see him there.

The next day I wandered around the grounds of the main festival gathering area, it was green and grassy, and had a beach just a little ways off.  No one had planned much for food, but people were bringing in their own, some sharing, some asking for donations to split the cost.  Children were running around laughing.  There were two young boys (around 10) that were somehow attached to me, friends perhaps, not my children but in a way there with me.  They asked me for pizza and I told them that I had three dollars in quarters, if they could scrounge up another two dollars, I would take them to Little Ceasars later.  They were happy with that answer, and I left them on a wooden bridge that you see at playgrounds, only far more expansive.  I wandered into an area where there was a small performance, someone playing piano.  20 or so chairs were set up, and I was delighted that I had come at the right time.  I remarked to the person next to me that I always try to make it to these performances, and had memories of prior events I had gone to in that setting.  There, I saw the rich young man.  He seemed interested in me, but I was too busy enjoying the festival and had other concerns so I didn't talk with him. 

After the performance I walked through different art displays that the festival had to offer.  One was a hall covered in Japanese art, scence of people in Japan, flowers, buildings.  I sighed and said to the person wandering near me, I would live here.  There.  I have lived there before. 

Then, I went out into the grassy area and met up with a girl I have been friends with most of my life, like a cousin.  We had both been working some days of the week at the home of a little boy who had some kind of severe disability.  He was about 8, unable to walk, and unable to speak up for himself, but had a very sweet energy and we both cared about him very much.  The girl asked me how he was doing, which surprised me because I though she had been there recently.  She said that the woman from social services had taken over her hours.  I was alarmed by that, since on my days that same woman was always there, sitting on the couch like it was her house, talking to the boys father, and something just didn't feel right about the situation.  The woman had harmful intentions.  The girl and I wanted to talk about it more, but wanted to be sure we had privacy, so we walked on, looking for a place to talk.  Another girl came up to us like she knew us, but as far as we could remember we had never met her.  She was thin, pale, stringy hair, an odd face that seemed like she had trouble fitting in with regular society.  She sad immediately- you said you would take me to 44th street!  There is a funeral there later that I need to go to.  You can come with me, and then we will come back here.  My companion and I looked at each other, I thought of taking the boys for pizza anyway, so we shrugged and agreed to take her.  We didn't know who the funeral was for, and didn't ask.  The girl was satisfied, and walked away.  Shortly after that, I was a coin in the dirt and picked it up, thinking of the boys' pizza money.  It was larger than a quarter, old and worn but the engravings were still clear.  The front had a man's face in profile and said that it was a 51 cent piece.  I turned it over and it said "tarot" on the back, and had a picture of a thigh bone, it said "mark of the severed leg", and another message next to that but that message didn't stay with me.  I turned to my friend in amazement, since this coin was directly related to the situation with the little boy we took care of.  I knew the second message was information or direction about him, or the social services woman, and what we could do.  I put the coin in my pocket, and we kept looking for a place to talk.

We found a house that was familiar, and went into the bathroom and shut the door, but we didn't want to be interrupted, so in the bathroom there was another door down to the basement.  We went down there, and shut the door.  Still not feeling like we would have privacy there, we walked through the basement with its low ceilings and piles of boxes to another door, which led to an indoor pool that hadn't been used in years.  It was tiled, and had a gentle slope down to the deep end.  We started talking about the boy's situation, and very soon a nun came through the door and we stopped.  She was suspicious about what we had been discussing since we stopped so suddenly, so I told her that we used to play in this house as children and were reminscing, looking at all places we had fun when we were 6.  At that moment I could vividly remember playing in that place when I was little, the girl and I running around, even swimming in the pool.  I don't know if I have had dreams with that girl before when I was 6, or since then, or if in my dream I just had very clear memories to fill in the richness of the dream.  But I knew I had been there many times, and I remember the exact feeling of the room, details of how it looked both drained and with water.  And then, I woke up. 

Unconditional Love

A lot of parents talk about how deeply they fell in love with their perfect, beautiful infant the moment they met.  I was enthralled with the process of pregnancy, enjoying the entire experience of hosting a growing person.  Labor was wonderful, birth was miraculous.  Meeting this tiny crying creature that is called "my son" was a moment I will never forget.  From the time I knew he existed I started to feel love for this person, and seeing him certainly was amazing.  But I would compare it to when I met my partner.  I remember vividly the first time I ever saw Michael walk past me.  I had an instant, strong reaction that stuck with me, and I immediately had the seeds of infatuation and love growing.  The birth of that relationship began at that moment, and the deep, daily intimate, love I share with him now was present then.  But at that particular time, I didn't know him very well, I knew almost nothing about him.  I could feel love and it was real, but I didn't know very much about what made Michael, Michael.  It was a mysterious, magical feeling.   Very much like meeting Avian, my little golden haired son.  I did love him right away, but I didn't know much about who he was, what makes Avian, Avian.  Being a parent is a marvelous, challening, elating, frustrating, joyous, fulfilling process.  Recently, as Avian has approached two years old and has reached a developmental stage where he can express himself quite clearly, I have noticed a real shift in my relationship with him.  Now instead of just having a general infatuation feeling for him (which did sometimes wear thin in the wee hours of yet another sleepless night during his earlier days), I have a deeper understanding of who this person is.  I can have a relationship with Him.  We can talk, exchange ideas, I can listen to his requests, needs, demands, feelings, experiences and can more understanding about what this individual is like, what his personality leans towards, the kinds of things he is interested in.  It is wonderful.  His fits, screaming rages, his head-banging when he is frustrated, his flinging of the spoon because I mixed his granola before he got a chance to tell me to add raisins...all of that is so normal for his age, so appropriate for his development, for his individuation process.  It is a delight to see his feelings emerge, to know that he can clearly communicate them to me, and that I can support that process, help him handle things when he is overwhelmed, model alternatives and coping skills, and coach him on how to explain his ideas when he needs it.  I just read the exceptional book "Unconditional Parenting", and it came at exactly the right time.  I don't see his "acting up" as a battle of wills or him defying me.  He is experiencing the world, and it is overwhelming, he is feeling feelings and they are huge.  I am so glad I get to walk along with this incredible growing person and help him figure out life.  He is helping me figure out life at the same time.  The more I get to know him, the more I can love who he is, unconditionally.

Anger

Anger is a normal emotional experience of every human being.  Sometimes the weather is sunny and warm, sometimes it is cold and overcast.  Emotions are like the weather for our inner landscape.  Recently I've been learning how to be more in touch with my own emotional responses, and anger is an important feeling to get to know.   "Pleasant"or "positive" emotions aren't as challenging for me to process- who doesn't enjoy a gorgeous blue sky and perfect temperature?  But storms, even small ones, can be really disruptive if I'm not internally prepared.  Some people have trouble managing their anger and have innapropriate outbursts, but I had been in the habit of ignoring my anger, like trying to drive in a snow storm but refusing to believe the conditions are dangerous.  So now, learning about my friend anger is helping me understand myself better.  I talked with my lightworker coach about this yesterday, and she had some simple but profound tips for me I'd like to share.

* NEVER allow anger in the car.  It is a form of entrapment, and neither person can leave the situation if they feel overwhelmed.
*CHOOSE one room in your house for angry/heated discussions.  The energy of anger is powerful, and isolating it to one area allows space for the experience without spreading it all over. 
*GO outside if possible when you are angry or need to have a discussion that has anger attached to it.  The peaceful energy of nature helps disperse the intensity.
*IMMEDIATELY  stopping someone from using their anger to SABOTAGE, CONTROL, or ABUSE you is ALWAYS appropriate.
*YOU don't need to ask permission from anyone to stand up for yourself.  If someone is demeaning you, tell them to stop. 
*TAKE time and space when needed, to allow yourself to experience the feeling of anger without being harmful to the other person.
*NOTICE what kinds of general issues and personal situations trigger anger.  That allows you to be ready to respond rationally when those situations arise.

New Years Resolutions:
Enjoy my family, my life, myself
as fully, mindfully as I can each moment
Identify and remove obstacles that are
between me and my best self, best life
Allow myself to grow, and give my
inner child and goddess what I need to
do so.  Adventures await!  Happy 2013!