I stopped watching the news, here’s what I do instead

The art of meditation and it's affect on abuse recovery

How do you fill your days? Watching TV and the news. Reading the papers. Scrolling social on your phones. Of course, we all go to work and then return home to complete projects that seem to have the greatest importance but bring us little joy.

We are world-weary. Most of us are buffeted by continuous torrents of tasks, responsibilities, and distressing news. But there are ways to find peace and pleasure in our daily lives despite there seeming to be so much at political stake. We need to set boundaries on how much bad news we ingest.

A small room in Boston

At January 17, 2020
By Lisa
In Experiences, Features, Wellness, Writing
2

I write from a small room in Boston without a view. There are two west-facing windows which open to the mustard-colored clapboard siding of the neighboring three-story, and at this time, it is an advantageous vantage point. It keeps my attention focused on my writing and my mission.

Several weeks ago, I took to rearranging the furniture in this room to something I felt was more conducive to creativity. Pushing my desk into a corner I made a cozy place for concentration. A great chair, good lighting, and a variety of sacred items that I believe help my process. It’s a comfortable room also containing an old unused fireplace in the corner — it’s interior bricks painted white against a red wall. There are piles of books, journals, candles, and two sleepy cats. I see this arrangement as something I hope will prove beneficial in the full immersion of my craft because an enemy also lurks within these walls.

The War of Art, written by Steven Pressfield, discusses this enemy. It is known as Resistance. Pressfield refers to Resistance using a capital letter and assigns to it some powerful personality traits. It is what he considers the major deterrent of artists being able to do their work. It is a formable enemy — invisible, insidious, impersonal, and infallible. The battle with Resistance is fought on a daily basis.

Strength for broken spirits

I cried yesterday. That doesn’t happen often. I cried until my eyes were swollen, my body exhausted, and the cats freaked out because they didn’t know what to do about me. But that is generally the way – most people (and evidently cats) don’t know how to react to someone’s sadness or tragedy.

The cause of yesterday’s crying jag might have been because I was working on my memoir and memories were stirring deep. It might have been because of the post I read by Final Girl over at Kelly Sundberg’s site*. Whatever the reason, that crying session felt really good.

While I’m not particularly prone to crying, I’ve done my fair share of boohooing over the last year and a half. I’ve shed tears because of family and friends who have been silent. I’ve cried because of arguments with my son as he tried to reach through my trauma. I’ve cried over triggers (always a surprise) and an assortment of issues which were really uncomfortable.

Yesterday was different. I cried for me. I cried for the person I was twenty years ago, the person I was seven years ago, three years ago, and for the person I am today. I apologized to all those women. Naive and trusting. Scared and alone. Empowered and strong.

***

People often tell me how strong I am. They have been telling me this all my life. They tell me so often that it has began to feel dismissive. So, what does it means to be strong and what does it mean when we are told we are strong?

The Wonder of What We Stand to Lose

I’m so excited to share with you my cover story, The Wonder of What We Stand to Lose, for the winter issue of Venü Magazine 2017/18.

In this issue, I cover the work of pastel artist Zaria Forman. Zaria creates large-scale drawings inspired by her trips to the Arctic and Antarctic aboard the National Geographic Explorer and NASA’s Operation IceBridge. Zaria’s story is not only about creating beautiful work, but it also shares her personal story and her mission to spread awareness on the very real concerns of global warming.

Venü Magazine Cover Story by Lisa Mikulski

Here is an excerpt from the story:

Changing and shifting, the exact subject matter of Zaria Forman’s art can never be captured again. Unlike paintings or photos of landscapes or landmarks – those places where an artist can return again and again – the icebergs of the Arctic and Antarctic are melting and the waters of the Maldives are raising. By the time Forman has completed a drawing, the natural landscape that once existed has diminished and transformed.

Forman has made it her life’s mission to provide us with stunning large-scale artworks of icebergs, glaciers, and the sapphire blues of thousand-year-old ancient ice. In addition to providing us with these highly detailed and majestic views – she creates her work using only her fingers – the work serves to call attention to the urgency that climate change is having upon some of the world’s most vulnerable regions.

Traveling with NASA and National Geographic Explorer, she has passionately sought to capture the story of what we stand to lose. However, rather than bringing to us the tragedy of what is unfolding in these areas, Forman brings the beauty of what she has seen.

“There is, of course, all kinds of bad news out there about climate change. There’s the fact that the past three years have been the hottest on record, extreme weather is wreaking havoc all over the world, the polar bear population in the Arctic is in rapid decline, and now we’re faced with an administration that ignores these problems – contributing to environmental decline with their denial of it,” says Forman.

Make Trump Irrelevant

Make him irrelevant.

This man is a scourge upon our nation and a plight upon the world. Since returning to the US, I’ve been pretty quiet about politics and my opinions on this guy. I’ve sat, listened, and watched him actively work to destroy and divide our country and I’ll be honest, his behavior rings so damn familiar to the reason I escaped from Sweden that it serves to re-traumatize me. The same type of behavior. The same holier-than-thou attitude. The same vindictive, vengeful, smirking personality. The same brilliant, two-steps-ahead, crazy-making cancer of an individual with an agenda for harm and hate. This is the destructive and vicious handy-work of the wildly creative animal known as a malignant narcissist.

Thoughts on rebuilding a life

A friend of mine recently wrote to me asking, “How does one go about starting a new life?” She explained that everything in her present situation was unacceptable and she desperately needed changes. She needed really big life changes.

Her reason for writing to me was because, knowing my past history, she considered me to be a bit of an expert on the subject. I’ve gone about and reinvented my own life twice in the last five years – the first time through choice, the second from trauma. Both events were life changing and challenging, the second much more than the first.

Having given my friend’s question a good deal of thought – for this is not a question to be taken lightly – I wrote to her providing the only answer I could, “It takes something extraordinary”.

The Assault of Digital Distraction

Living in the aftermath of the 2016 US presidential election is akin to being tangled up in a domestic violence situation. No matter how much or how loud you plead for the abuse to stop, it continues. It’s noisy. There is word salad, and chaos, and confusion. One tends to constantly re-examine one’s grasp on reality – checking and re-checking to ensure that what we just heard or what we just read makes sense. Or not. It’s emotional abuse on a grand scale.

The Importance of Place

The New York Times ran a piece on their Learning Network, October 22, 2013, entitled How Much Does Your Neighborhood Define Who You Are? While the post was written several years ago, the notion of it stayed with me in particular because of the country where I was living at the time.

No, Sweden was not for me and the culture – while I had always dreamed of embracing it and did so while living outside the country – in reality, I found that it countered everything I held dear. The inability of being able to authentically express myself in word and deed stymied me profoundly both personally and professionally. The ways I went about marketing my business were no longer truisms in that Scandinavian country. I often felt as if my IQ was being systemically drained because very few people, while they were smart and well read, were willing to discuss what they read or how they felt about it. Debating ideas is not conversational fare at your typical Swedish diner party.

But, intelligence is not only based on how much one knows but also in how one expresses it. Or not. Gone were the days of healthy political debate and intellectual conversation. I missed them dearly.

All of this begged the question, would I – would we – be different people if we were born and raised elsewhere?