Valerie Reiss: June 2009 Archives

The economic downturn is real. Unemployment is high, business is down, people are grapping with horrible realities of home loss--these are scary times. There's an overall tone of gloom. Here in NYC people are extra-crabby on the subway (I hearby ban the irritated cluck-and-sigh as a way to express annoyance). I imagine it's the same all over. But I, for one, am fighting for mood-independence. I do not want to pitch myself off the gloom bridge.

Perhaps it's easy for employed me to say, but I notice it's a struggle to extract myself from the overall vibe--because I'm well aware that today's employed could be tomorrow's worried thumb-twiddling. Melancholy and worry are some of my main default settings. But I'm trying to remember that I am not socially obligated to feel lousy all the time. This moment is fine. And all the moments of today have been fine. It's a mental practice to keep myself there--especially as someone who tends to take on the feelings of others like a particularly absorbant sponge.

Here are some ways I'm fighting the urge to be bummed about the economy (or Michael Jackson, or whatever else is consuming mass consciousness at the moment).

1) Watch Your Language. "These are tough times" may be true, but it's a bummer of a sentence, it doesn't come from my soul, and it's not something I want to reinforce. These are also the best of times and having our words reflect that creates a positive spiral.

2) Deliberately Disconnect. Sitting on public transport or in a waiting room it's incredibly easy for me to take in all the sullen faces and begin to match my mood to theirs, emotional chameleon that I am. We can catch ourselves by asking: Is this my sadness? If not, nip it--certainly we have enough of our own actual feelings to handle.

3) Careful What You Read. I've consciously stayed away from "trend pieces" about the direction of the economy. It's not (only) that I'm buring my head in the sand, it's that the experts don't know any better than I do which "direction we're headed." Most of the stuff on TV, radio, online, and in print are sheer, time- and page-filling speculation. Do they have more information than I do? Yep and once in a while it's useful to catch up. But there's no need to bathe in the negativity soup.

How do you stay positive when the masses seem to be dwelling on the negative?

I went to a Bikram yoga class this morning for the first time in almost a year. It's the kind of uber-sweaty yoga done in a room that's about 115 degrees. I actually like the heat, it's the meanie teachers I can't stand. But today's instructor was actually not overtly shaming or pushy. It was nice. She did go by the standard Bikram script, though, which has very sketchy lines like "if your forehead's not on your knee you won't get any  benefits from this pose." It's like, Lady, would you like to be inside my hamstring right now? I'm getting some benefits, trust me.

Anyway, even though today's was a relatively pleasantish experience, thought I'd share this fantastic Nina Paley cartoon, which I strongly suspect is based on a Bikram class.

To see more of Nina Paley's cartoons and other stuff, click here.

Have you ever had an, er, interesting yoga experience like that one?

Tip: Be Gentle with Yourself

Give yourself a lot of space. When you lose someone you love, parts of you go crazy. Your emotions go on a rollercoaster. Let them go crazy. Cry when you need to cry, laugh if you share a funny memory. Listen to your body and let your emotions take you where you are.

-- from Beliefnet's Coping with Loss and Grief gallery. For more tips go here.

If you're interested in which foods have the most or least pesticides, check out the new What's On My Food? database created by the Pesticide Action Network. (PAN).

It requires a little bit of number-sorting, but it's really helpful, especially if you're trying to track down particular pesticide concentrations in particular foods. They break down the presence of chemicals like suspected hormone disruptors to known carcinogens. You can check out everything from almonds to winter squash and see stats for conventional versus organic (the sad state of our food system is that even organics have some chemical nasties due to wind, water, and dust--though MUCH smaller amounts than sprayed foods).  

The point of the site is not to add more fear to how we eat (though that may be a temporary side-effect). But it's rather to encourage citizens like us to go one step further than buying organic--to lobby our representatives and support grassroots wok to get our pesticide regulation system looking a little more like the European Union's "precautionary principle." As PAN writes, "Since the Environmental Protection Agency (E.P.A.) regulates most chemicals on a chemical-by-chemical basis, the combined and cumulative effects of a mixture of pesticides are nearly impossible for them to address - and so they usually don't."

The site has links for various ways you can get involved and take action to be a better "food citizen."