Where is My Off Switch?

So jewelry-making has become an absorbing and lovely part of life (especially important when major parts of it are falling/have fallen apart). And it’s much more “adaptive” as they say, I’m sure, than a lot of things. Now I just have to find my off switch to keep myself from going ’til I get blisters . I guess the point of blistering from too much bezel-setting tool friction is sort of working as an off switch, but I wonder if I could learn to “quit while I’m ahead” as they say. They say so many things, don’t they. But they don’t seem to be able to help me find the off switch or the middle way or what I believe they call balance.

As per the going to extremes, I am planning to do a thing at a local yoga place tomorrow where they’re doing the primary series followed by the second series and some bits of the third series, as it’s meant to be done and wiry Ashtanga types do, but which is to take three hours. I should also mention that I am not wiry or guru-y. But this sort of thing does, more or less, keep me out of trouble, or at least just on the outskirts of trouble. I could do better, but also worse.

I’m coming off a series of nights of fits of fear over various imaginary dangers and threats (I am saying that I’m coming off it because that is what I hope but I don’t know–this sort of thing comes in chunks/episodes it seems). But utterly exhausting myself through a long exercisey thing often helps, like a sort of rebooting–we shall see.

Not Moderation Station. The Middle Way? What is “middle?”

WoYoPracMo (each day this month, at least ten minutes of yoga practice) yoga for yesterday and today:  yesterday was some forward bends and restorative poses, but mostly I was bumbling around recovering from my 15 mile-ish (I’m guessing distance) run. Today I did a bit over an hour’s worth of some vinyasa flows and some things like bridge, shoulder stand, twists, folds. Good ways to squeeze out the lingering effects of yesterday. I did a nice long corpse pose after, who knows how long really because no one was supervising!

My run was an adventure, a journey all over town. I was somewhat non-functional mentally afterwards though–not much glucose left for the brain I suppose. It’s cool to be able to do something like that–something I didn’t think I could do until recently. Five years ago a couple miles felt hard. I’m thinking now though that if I seem to be staying in pretty okay shape with all the pavement-pounding that maybe I’ll try to whole thing–I hesitate to even name the full mileage of a certain type of long running race. You see if 15 miles went well, my little brain says let’s go for more–more, more, more is one thing it likes to say. It sometimes also likes to say less, less, less. Extremes are what it seems to like.

Finding things I’m afraid to do and/or feel unsure I’ll be able to and then doing them (with some working up to them along the way) has become a little policy of mine. I overdo it some (of course, no moderation here). But it’s been a useful practice of sorts. It’s a way of getting used to operating even with fear swirling around. Not that I exactly need to any more familiarization with how that feels–I’ve been doing it all my life. But maybe I’m beginning to do it in a more intentional way, in a way in which I don’t exactly feel in control but I don’t feel like a big tumbleweed either. I’m managing to do scary things (which some days seems to be everything, just about) without too much running about shrieking in hysteria. I am experiencing less paralysis by anxiety–not none, but less.

Speaking of fear, but of a bit different kind, or at least a different flavor, I notice my startle reflex and general level of disposition to terror to be a variable thing; it seems to drift down and then get jacked back up for a while. It’s been a bit heightened lately. I wonder what governs this? Lots of things I think–triggers of past terrifying situations, feeling unmoored or discombobulated, reenacting past terrifying situations in my attempt to cope with my resurfaced terrors (this is a nasty bind if I ever heard of one!), scary movies of trailers therefrom, tiredness and other physiological/brain situations (including temporal lobe antics, which I have a few of from time to time). I don’t know that I have any particular point here, just musing about the range of things that can go into emotional states–it’s kind of amazing how complicated we are. That’s a thought–let’s try to put a cheery spin on being a bit on our reactive and difficult tendencies!