Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

Anita Mathias's Blog on Faith and Art

Every Prison has a Door… (and We Usually Have the Key!)  

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     From Practice to Mastery Image Credit: https://guitarsquid.com

So, not being a super-disciplined person, I’ve struggled all my adult life with a few things, surprisingly common struggles for those for whom discipline is problematic.

I carry more weight than I should. Okay, I have lost 47 pounds over the last few years as I have changed my diet but I have more to lose. I have romantic ideas of waking with the dawn, but more commonly wake at 7 a.m. I have yet to run a supremely tidy and organised house; probably, half my stuff could be safely given away.  And I have rarely been a productive writer. Keats feared that he might die before his pen had gleaned his teeming brain. Me too, me too!

It recently struck me that each of these struggles which I’ve had for most of  my married life of 30 years, is to achieve something finite. I don’t have an infinite amount of weight to lose. I could lose it in a year or less! I don’t have an infinite amount of things to declutter; I could do it in six months as Marie Kondo says, or in nine months as Joshua Becker of The Minimalist Home says. If I turn in 5 minutes earlier each day… it’s not an infinite number of days before I will be waking up at 5 a.m. And if the tidying/organising, and exercise, and early rising creates time… who knows, I might even finish the books of my heart.

* * *

In what’s perhaps a metaphor, the enslaved Israelites who escaped slavery and Pharaoh wandered in the desert for 40 years. To walk across the Sinai desert should take 10-11 days, guides say. Similarly, many of the things people struggle with for decades could be dealt with in months or a year: weight, messiness, excessive night-owlness, for instance. Two professional women recently told me that they were chronically late. I struggle with that too… but less and less so. But chronic lateness can be cured–by strategies like adding 50% to the estimated driving time (a tip from Greg McKeown’s excellent book Essentialism),  and 50% to your estimated dressing-up time, and aiming to be seated, ready and reading 15 minutes before you leave the house!

These things we struggle with are what Jesus calls the light burden and the easy yoke, difficulties, but with God’s help, not impossibilites. It is possible to be tidy, of course–easy for those who have always been tidy, and hard for those who have never been tidy, but possible for everyone. Shedding unhealthy weight is easier for those who have good eating habits and the physical strength to exercise hard; harder for those of sluggish metabolism, or who are not strong enough to exercise vigorously. But it should be possible for everyone. (I’ve lost 25 pounds over the last 13 months, though a combination of the ketogenic diet and intermittent fasting. I just stopped eating dinner over six weeks ago, and skipping it was surprisingly easy!). Waking early is perhaps possible for everyone, though I have not yet been able to sustain it long-term. And finishing books is possible to everyone God calls to write.  

At our last few holidays, Cordoba, Berlin and Krakow (all this year, 2019, yes, we are travelling too much)  especially in Krakow, Poland, when we were not eating dinner, we were astonished by how free time opened up in the evenings when Roy and I lived with just a suitcase each, in a hotel suite, and how many loose ends of our family business, our lives and work, we were able to tie up after a full day of sight-seeing. We became wistfully determined to simplify our lives at home for the same sense of spaciousness and peace and extra time.

So, at the moment, I am (perhaps foolishly!) barely writing, but focusing on getting my home tidy and decluttered (especially because I want to move in a year or two). I am focusing on diet (keto!) and fitness, believing Rick Warren statement: if you want to change anything the first thing to do is to change your body to provide the energy for other changes. The decluttering, the spiritual peace and serenity from the order, the brisk walks and yoga to get healthy, the weight loss, the waking earlier, will release more writing time within a few days or a week. I hope so. I pray so. I believe so.

But for now, baby steps.

If you can’t fly, then run; if you can’t walk run, then walk; if you can’t walk, then crawl, but by all means keep moving. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Discipline, short-term suffering is painful for the moment, but it eventually yields what Scripture winsomely calls “a harvest of righteousness and peace.”

It’s what my friend Paul Miller, who discipled me for 5 years in the late nineties, called a J-Curve. The seed has to fall into the ground and die for fruitfulness, as Jesus died to provide the Spirit, and as an atoning sacrifice for the sins of the whole world. The death of Jesus involved less than 24 hours of intense physical and emotional suffering, 3 hours of which consisted of immense, unimaginable physical suffering.  However, the fruits of the resurrection of Jesus reverberate on and on in the life of the world, in my life, and perhaps in yours, dear reader.

Jesus strikingly says that we are not worthy of him if we do not take up our cross, and embrace the suffering that a fruitful creative life calls for. In all these things I’ve mentioned, there is a cross, a small death, and much joy at the end of it. The cross I am bearing for the next six months is decluttering my house. It will lead to a resurrection of energy, and focus and time. The cross I am bearing for the next six months to a year is getting stronger and shedding the weight that hinders, which will give me the joy and resurrection of more energy and time. The cross of turning in early rather than surfing the net or desultory reading will add to the joy and productivity of early mornings. The resurrection that these things may bring will reverberate and echo, sweet and magnified, through the rest of my life, and perhaps, if God blesses my writing, though the lives of others too. May it be so Lord, Amen.

 

Some resources which I found very helpful, and you might too.

Gary Taubes: Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It on Amazon.com and on Amazon.co.uk

Gretchen Rubin describes reading this book as a lightning bolt moment that changed her eating habits, immediately, effortlessly and permanently. It has been a little bit like that for me.

To quote from Taubes: Carbohydrates are uniquely fattening because they elevate levels of insulin, and insulin signals to our fat cells to store fat, and to our lean cells not to burn it, which inhibits the use of fat for fuel. For a diet to successfully reduce obesity, it has to reduce insulin levels, and restrict carbs.

The Complete Guide to Fasting by Jason Fung on Amazon.com and on Amazon.co.uk.

I found intermittent fasting far easier than I imagined, and I love the mental clarity, the physical energy—and, of course, the weight loss.

The Keto Diet: The Complete Guide by Leanne Vogel on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. More a dietary change than “a diet,” though I’ve never found losing weight as easy as on this.

Marie Kondo: The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying on Amazon.com and on Amazon.co.uk

I have some ambivalence towards her ideas, but I can testify to the huge amount of energy in many areas of my life as I began to donate my surplus stuff

Joshua Becker: The Minimalist Home on Amazon.com

I find his blog Becoming Minimalist motivating, and here it is in a convenient form

Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown on Amazon.com and on Amazon.co.uk

Strongly recommend. Don’t we all need essentialism?

And if you’d like a Christian perspective on these things, a book by my friend and mentor Paul Miller.

J-Curve: Dying and Rising with Jesus in Everyday Life by Paul Miller. On Amazon.com

and on Amazon.co.uk

 

The Life-Changing Practice of Meditation

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So, a couple of years ago, almost on a whim, my husband Roy and I took an intensive eight week course in Mindfulness at the Oxford Department of Psychiatry! (and at the famous local psychiatric hospital, the Warneford!!)

I didn’t really know what Mindfulness was, but I “knew,” we should do it. You can imagine how annoyed Roy felt!!

As it turned out, it was an amazing course, filled with many new ways of thinking and being. We learned and practiced different meditations such as the body scan, walking meditation, meditations when experiencing difficult things, and mindful movement (i.e. yoga, “yoga is meditation.”) While, unsurprisingly, not many stuck, those that did were life-changing!

I am learning the art of stopping and taking a breath, though the three step breathing space, a four minute meditation. It sometimes feels as if I am too busy, too stressed, too behind, running too late, to stop and take a few minutes to just breathe for heaven’s sake… but doing that settles my mind and then I am so much more effective. In fact, it is a cure for the racing mind, the busy heart, and the slumbering spirit…stop, breathe, calm the mind.

“Sitting meditation” is what I practice most often. Forty minutes, the optimal meditation session, takes you, your mind, body, and spirit to another, generally peaceful and joyful state, and I aim to spend forty minutes a day on meditation, though I do it according to need—sometimes two sets of twenty minutes which some teachers say yields maximum benefits, sometimes four sets of ten minutes which calms me and gives focus before I work, or deal with difficult tasks, thoughts, and emotions.

I found learning meditation so helpful that Roy and I are currently doing a 12 week advanced course in Mindfulness at the Warneford, led by Willem Kuyken, Oxford Professor of Mindfulness; it’s a mind-changing and joyful experience.

So here are some personal benefits I have experienced over the last two years of regular meditation, some of them accidental and unexpected!

1 Better Sleep

I often listen to a guided meditation by Mark Williams or Jon Kabat-Zinn to calm my mind, which usually has a hundred thoughts, questions, and things to resolve. I am calm and sleepy by the end of it and drift off to sleep easily. Meditation for me is a gateway into sleep.

2 Focus and Creativity

I frequently meditate, just for ten minutes, before beginning to write, and it helps focus my mind. It is a brilliant investment of time. I was interested to read that Juval Noah Harari who condensed the history of humanity into Sapiens, 464 bestselling pages meditates for two hours a day, and says he would not have been able to  focus on the important themes and events in the morass of world history without the practice of meditation.

If my mind is scattered and distracted, meditating before I settle down to write helps me focus, an essential skill for creative work in this culture in which the internet, with its invitations to distraction, its gratification of idle curiosity, and its addictive dopamine surges make focus more difficult.

3 Weight Loss

This is possibly an accidental benefit, a synergistic, serendipitous connection… though perhaps not. But since I started meditation in May 2017, I have lost 30 pounds, over two stone.

One day, I realised that my Fitbit showed that my weight had dropped for each week I had been meditating, and hypothesized a connection. Then I worked with a health coach, who suggested  meditating twice a day for 20 minutes (to lower cortisol, the stress hormone which prevents weight loss) and texting her after each session.

I have now pretty much broken the habit of emotional eating and snacking, and though I have more weight to lose, I am hopeful because your trajectory is more important than where you currently are. And I am trying to eat more mindfully, actually savouring food.

4 Relief of chronic pain

I had crippling, life-affecting pain from sciatica for over a year (and, amazingly, was healed from chronic pain after an Oxford Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery PRAYED for me in church!!!).

I worked with a health coach and got Sports Massages, but then she tried removing the pain without placing her hands on me, but simply by meditating with me… and, lo and behold, it worked.

So I used meditation when pain gripped me. It calmed the mind, it relaxed the body, and, astonishingly, pain left while I focused on my breath. The benefits of meditation for chronic pain have been well-documented by Jon Kabat-Zinn, and in this Atlantic article, for instance.

5 A Pathway into Prayer

For me, meditation is a pathway into prayer. Sometimes, my mind is racing, and my emotions feel turbulent, and I know it would take a long time to settle down to prayer. So I do a ten or twenty minute guided meditation until I am calm enough to enter the presence of Jesus.

I used to calm myself and resolve things through prayer, but prayer for me can be work; it’s conversation; it takes energy, and, at night, it uses the mind which I want to simmer down. Meditation, especially the two practices I use most often, Sitting Meditation, and Lying Down Meditation, calms the mind and body, and creates the necessary conditions for fruitful prayer, which for me happens when I actually “see” the face of Jesus, and am in his presence.

6 Problem-Solving.

I love the “Sitting with Difficulties Meditation.”  You get super-calm through breathing, and then face the difficulty…an emotion, task, person or situation. It is a half an hour meditation, and during the course of it, I usually know exactly what I should do about the difficulty, and what the next steps should be. If it is an inter-personal hassle, sometimes I have a better understanding of the person’s behaviour, and more compassion, and forgiveness comes more easily. Sometimes, I just take the difficulty and leave it in God’s hands to do what he wants with it. It functions as a Serenity Prayer, accepting the things I cannot change, and changing the things I can. And it cuts problems down to size. Some annoying situations and random people one can just blow off.

7 Emotional and Mental Health

Meditation helps me calm my emotions, and achieve a (sometimes temporary) serenity from which productivity flows. It gives me space to confront my thoughts and the emotional niggles and dissatisfactions which otherwise would be shoved underground to emerge in a perhaps harmful form.  When under stress, a 20 minute guided meditation is a way of checking out, like taking a small boat out to sea, and when I return, I am so much calmer.

Emotional health is not something I have focused on… In my teens and twenties, I focused on my intellectual life, reading, reading, reading; in my thirties and forties, I began to focus on my interior and spiritual life. A health breakdown, almost five years ago, made me begin to take my physical health seriously. And now, I am also trying to be more cognisant of my emotional life, not just interrogating what I think about people, situations, projects, commitments, holiday destinations, but also what I feel about them, for emotions, the iceberg beneath the surface, control more of our actions and behaviour than we realise. Our intuition and emotions carry a lot of wisdom, for perhaps the heart, the gut, the unconscious is smarter than our thinking mind.

8 Connecting with the Body

Meditation is teaching me to reconnect with the body, and its wisdom and signals. Hey, Anita, your stomach is tightening, your breath is constricting, be careful of this person, this situation, this commitment, this demand. Hey Anita, your heart is beating faster, your mind is racing. Stop. Meditate. Slow down. Slow down.

Thoughts create actual molecules in our bodies, raising levels of stress hormones like cortisol or adrenaline, bonding hormones like oxytocin, or “happy chemicals” like the neurotransmitters serotonin or dopamine. Just as bodily tension or pain stresses the mind, the mind causes psychosomatic physical pain and tension. Meditation calms both mind and body, increasing both physical and mental health and productivity through the power of the mind.

9 Learning to be Present

This is something I am beginning to learn, but the practice of paying attention, though practices like the body scan teaches me to come into my body and just be present… for instance, when I am physically uncomfortable or bored in Yoga class, or in social or group situations. It is so rare in our distracted age to either listen or be listened to with full attention that increasingly people pay therapists big bucks to do just that.  The practice of meditation is helping me learn to be really present, and really listen to people with my full attention, and, of course, when you do that you learn far more than what they saying, for, unless you are dealing with a practised con-person, the eyes, face, and body speak their own language.

How can you learn to meditate?

I went to classes. However, if you need to learn promptly or haven’t the time or finance right now, I’d suggest

Mark Williams’ wonderful book Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Finding Peace in a Frantic World which has a meditation CD included, on Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com.

Or Jon Kabat-Zinn’s great and encyclopaedic book Full Catastrophe Living on Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk

Or Jon Kabat-Zinn’s magisterial meditation CDs on Amazon.com or on Amazon.co.uk

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Simple Organisation and Time-Management Strategy for Disciples of Jesus Christ

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As a young Christian, I (and my church) were influenced by World Harvest Mission’s Sonship Course. I went through it once with our pastor, Bob Hopper, and once with Paul Miller, who had co-written it.

I had not quite been in America for a decade then, and was still quite resistant to the way the American church conflated Christianity and the American way of maximum productivity. Very early on in Sonship, there was discussion of discipleship and daytimers (diaries). About how the battle to have quiet time with God was won or lost depending on when one went to bed the previous night. On the importance of organization.

There was this wonderful precept, “We all overestimate what we can do in the short run, and underestimate what we can do in the long run with the grace and power of God.”

Organization was presented an aspect of discipleship.

* * *

Roy and I were not organized. I, for instance, rarely bothered with calendars diaries or to do lists, preferring to keep things in my head. Which worked in the past, though now that life is very busy, I do need to write important things down!!

However, I have to say that the basic organizational strategy of ranking things according to their importance and urgency, and doing the most important (or urgent) first has begun to bring a sense of peace and harmony to our marriage.

* * *

 I have two mid-life reflections on this.

One is that is never too late to change. After a lifetime of being a messy, disorganized housekeeper and I am becoming tidier and more organized, week by week—as I set aside a weekly chunk of a few hours to put everything back in the right place, and get rid of everything I do not need, want or love.

The other is this: We need to be organised and disciplined in our use of time to be able to fulfil the destiny and calling God has for us. Without organisation, we are perhaps unlikely to make either our own dreams come true, or the plans God has for us.

Learning the basics of organisation and time-management is part of our calling to follow Jesus and be fruitful.

* * *

It’s amazing HOW MUCH the stress and the sense of being out of control has been alleviated by this simple tactic.
Each day make four lists,
A) Urgent, to be done that day, or in the next few days
B) Important
C) Good
D) Trivial.
First go through the urgent, then the important, the good and, last of all, the trivial.
Funny, after a few days of doing this, there is not much left on the urgent list, so we no longer bounce from crisis to crisis.

* * *

This famous story (from Evan Carmichael’s blog) illustrates the same point.

Ivy Ledbetter Lee  was a consultant for many business moguls of that time: Westinghouse, Lindbergh, Chrysler, and Charles M. Schwab. During his consultancy work for Bethlehem Steel, founded and run by Charles M. Schwab, Lee told Schwab, “”I can increase your people’s efficiency – and your sales – if you will allow me to spend fifteen minutes with each of your executives.” 

Schwab replied that what Bethlehem Steel employees needed was not to know more, but to work more… but asked Lee how much it would cost him. Lee said, “Nothing, unless it works. After three months, you can send me a check for whatever you feel it’s worth to you.”  

Thus a deal was made: in the span of about a ¼ of an hour, Lee was supposed to be able to give Schwab and his employees a method that would increase company effectiveness by at least 20-50%. 

Schwab called a meeting with his executives the next day. Once seated, Lee gave Schwab and the others a sheet of paper and told them to write down the six most important things they had to work on the next day. As they were writing them down, Lee instructed them to do number them in order of importance. 

Lee instructed those in the room further: they were to, each morning, pull out yesterday’s list and, at the beginning of their workday, and start working on Item 1 first. Once that was completed, they were to scratch that item out – and proceed to number 2 on the list, and so on – in order. He added that all were to read the list occasionally throughout the day, looking at the item to which they were currently attending.

 

 Lee told Schwab and his executives not to worry if they didn’t complete all tasks on their sheet for any certain day. It was only important that they work on the most important item first, then the next important, and so on – adding that, if this method didn’t improve efficiency, nothing would.

Lee finished up by telling Schwab and his employees to spend the last five minutes of every working day writing a new “must do” list for tomorrow’s tasks. They were to follow these steps every day for 90 days.

Lee called Schwab aside after he concluded the meeting and told him, “Try this method out for three months, then send me a check for whatever you think it was worth.”

Just a 15-minute meeting… and no more than 5 minutes a day for employees to write a list! 

A mere two weeks later, Schwab sent Lee a check for $25,000 (worth more than $400,000 in today’s dollars). He clipped a note to the check. In the note, Schwab told Lee that this was the most profitable business lesson he had ever learned – and that is saying something, considering that Schwab had, in earlier years, worked under financier J.P. Morgan! Over time, following this simple method, Schwab and his executives turned Bethlehem Steel into the biggest independent steel producer in the world, surpassing both U.S. Steel and Carnegie Steel, both for whom Schwab had been president prior to founding Bethlehem Steel. One simple method… and Schwab amassed a personal fortune of $100 million. 
The simple act of making prioritized lists is meant to increase productivity by 25%!!