Kindness and compassion are at the core of almost every mindfulness practice. I know this to be true and I teach this to my students. I often hear myself talking about the importance of practicing with kindness, acceptance, openness, non-striving, compassion, trust, and patience. My desire in teaching mindfulness is to allow people the opportunity to learn that Mindfulness is the awareness that arises out of intentionally paying attention in an open, kind and discerning way. I encourage people to be gentle with themselves and share that it is sometimes easier than others to practice mindfulness but to be compassionate with yourself. There is no right way to practice mindfulness. This is what I teach and this week I got to be the student struggling to learn this very lesson.
This past week our family embarked on what was to be a five night six day white water rafting adventure along the middle fork salmon river in Idaho. We would be rafting by day, camping along the riverside by night. My husband planned this trip with passion and excitement for almost an entire year, certain that this was going to be our families best vacation ever. He put up with consistent protests from our two daughters and admittedly myself assuring us that this was going to be a life altering adventure that we would remember forever.
After months of preparing and gathering necessary gear, we boarded our flight to Boise, Idaho. Once in Sun Valley, we boarded a bus with four other groups, at the crack of dawn, for the hour and a half ride to the put in point on the river. The safety talk was much briefer than I would have liked and after a quick fitting of helmets, life vests, and wet suits we were off.
The water levels were unexpectedly low for this time of year causing the rapids to be far more technical and challenging than anticipated by anyone including our guides. Within only a few minutes our raft was thrown into a rough rapid that required enormous concentration and strength to carry out the commands being yelled at us by our guide in the back of the raft. I thought to myself, "This is NOT bouncy and frolicky" like I had been told it would be. On the contrary, I was finding this quite nerve wracking. We maneuvered our way through the rapids, one after the next, following our guides commands. My arms were sore, despite my attempts to get in shape prior to this journey, my hands ached, and I was starving. Suddenly we were pulling over to the side of the river to be told that the sweep boat, that was carrying all of our supplies, had gotten lodged onto rocks and we needed to stay put until it was moving again. We waited patiently a good hour before we were on our way again, longing for the lunch I assumed we were eventually going to get.
The further down the river we got, the more challenging the rapids seem to get. When our fourteen year old daughter was thrown from the raft into a rush of violent water, I raced to grab her watching her oar float away as the boat threatened to leave her in the current of frothing water. Her hand slipped through mine and panic filled my body. As I grabbed a hold of both sides of her life vest at the shoulders, as I had been told to do, I heard her say, "help me help me" and I pulled with a force I didn't know I had to heave her back into the safety of the boat. I was shaking and on the verge of tears thinking that this was just more than I wanted to handle. My daughter shook the fall off and was back to the business of doing her part to get us through the rapids but I seemed unable to let it go. Fear took hold of me with an unrelenting grip. After a welcomed stop for lunch, I asked one of the other men to switch seats with me, knowing that the front seat I had been in all morning was the most challenging and wettest seats. I thought that perhaps giving someone else this responsibility might allow some of my fear to loosen its hold on me. Shortly into this second leg of the trip, this man, was violently launched into the rapids twice. Each time we were able to retrieve him quickly but I could not help but wonder if I hadn't switched spots with him, would I have been the one to have joined the ranks of the middle fork river swimming club? This was a club I vowed I would do everything in my power to avoid becoming a member.
The real moment of terror occurred further down the river when my husband was hurled into a rapid head first down stream unable to swim to the boat feet first but also unable to flip his feet under to be able to swim to us because of the surrounding rocks. During that brief safety talk, we were instructed to never stand up in the river. Being an experienced river rafter, my husband knew that the most common cause of death on the rapids was caused by people getting a foot caught in a rock only to be pressed down by the force of the current to drown. I grabbed his life vest but he could not position himself in a way to be pulled back into the boat. He started to slip under the boat and the look of fear in his eyes filled my heart with a panic I have only experienced twice before in my life. "Don't stand up" I screamed. "Help me" I yelled to others in the boat. We got my dear husband back into the boat, though he was very badly banged up from being bounced around and dragged through rocks. He was shaken up but like my daughter seemed able to let it go and continue doing what was needed to keep us moving forward. I, on the other hand, was left in a state of fear that I was unable to shake. I continued rowing but with an unrelenting fear in every stoke I took. I wanted out of this boat and I wanted to know that my family was all going to be safe.
With each rapid, I grew increasingly more afraid and everyone in our boat knew it. It was obvious as I screamed various things while our raft was getting thrown about into rocks. During one rapid the water came up over the boat filling my entire splash jacket with its ice cold water. I am too embarrassed to admit what I yelled out but it was not one of my finer moments. At one point during a calm stretch, I said to a woman near me, "Do you know what is really ironic? I actually teach mindfulness for a living. I teach people how to reduce the stress in their lives." She could not believe it. Who could blame her? I was a mess! I was anything but in the present moment and I was anything but calm. I was unable to be in the present moment but rather was in constant state of fear of the next rapid. Thoughts of what would happen if one of our daughters or I got thrown into something like my husband had been hurled into filled my mind. Paralyzed by my fears, I trudged along following our guides' commands praying that we would make it to camp safely. Twelve hours later, we all made it to camp emotionally and physically exhausted but safe.
I made light of how nervous I had been joking with others about how the mindfulness teacher was the most stressed out one in the boat. However, during my time alone, I thought more seriously about the way I had experienced fear grabbing a hold of me. I kept going back to what I emphasize when I teach mindfulness to others, about how important it is to be compassionate with ourselves, to not judge ourselves, to not go into practicing mindfulness with any set agenda of what is to happen but to simply allow everything to happen without judgement. Here I was with a wonderful opportunity to practice that. Could I just sit with this and be ok with the fact that I completely lost it for most of the day and was completely stuck in a place of fear unable to breath my way through to a place of peace and calm, unable to let go of the fear and stay in the present. Could I treat myself with the same love and compassion that I would treat a child who was fearful. How liberating it was to realize that in fact I could now do that for myself. To just sit with knowing that I was really scared out there and that it really was ok that I wasn't able to somehow let go of the fear and just be in each moment. I was not weak or doing anything wrong. I was human and I had been afraid. I could let go without adding to the stress of the day by now feeling bad that I had been so stressed. Perhaps some of you have experienced what I am describing? We can sometimes make a difficult situation even more challenging by how we punish ourselves for having done or not done things a certain way, for things we may have said or wished we had said, and the list can go on and on. Today was what it was and tomorrow would be another day.
The other great lesson this journey taught all of our family came when we all got really honest with ourselves and with each other and decided that this trip was just too much for all of us. That there really was no way that we could see ourselves keeping up this pace, physically or emotionally, for the entire six days and that it was OK for us to stop. Knowing how much this trip meant to my husband and how hard he had worked to make it the perfect vacation, made his willingness to bail out mean so much to me and our two daughters. To experience his love for his family be far greater than his need to make this trip be something that it just wasn't working out to be was in itself one of the greatest gifts of the trip. We had teased him, in the months leading up to the trip, that he was like Clark Griswold in Christmas Vacation but unlike Clark he was able to recognize when enough was enough and put the needs of himself and his family above everything else. Once our decision had been made, my dear husband used those same skills that got us into he river to get us out. He arranged for us to paddle down the river another ten miles to an airstrip, where we boarded a plane the size of my car to bring us out of the wilderness. I am not sure that I could have boarded this rickety plane, that would be maneuvering through massive mountains, if I was not so desperate to leave those shallow rocky rapids. We all climbed in with some trepidation knowing it was our only way out. As I squeezed into the tiny seat, I was able to pause and in this moment I was able to choose to practice mindfulness. I knew this would be a plane ride I would not enjoy and could potentially get stuck in that same state of fear that the rapids clutched me in. Instead I made the decision to take this leg of the journey one moment at a time, keeping my attention on the breath and sensations in my body. To appreciate the blessing in what I experienced, I must share that I have struggled with a fear of flying most of my adult life, at times needing to medicate to simply board a plane. Yet here I was, breathing and focusing on the sensations in my body, feeling nothing but peace and calm. We had to stop shortly after taking off to refuel and the pilot explained to us that he needed to fly into the mountains "light" with little fuel to get the altitude needed to get us out and now needed to fill up to get us to the next airport. Taking off I noticed his door was open and asked about that only to learn later that he does that in case the engine catches fire so that he can jump out with the fire extinguisher, that sat beneath my feet. This was a fact that I was glad I did not learn in full until after we landed safely.
At last we were on our commercial flight heading back to phoenix. We all had many mixed emotions but were all very glad to be heading home. I was a bit sad that the trip had not turned out as my husband had hoped. I felt sad for him, knowing he had put such effort into making this our perfect vacation and was surely wrestling with his own set of feelings over how it all went. I was so grateful that we were all safe and very relieved to not still be on the river. I was emotionally and physically drained and exhausted. Mostly, I felt blessed for the love we had for one another. We had endured, helped each other through our various breakdowns, which inevitably happened at different points of the trip for each of us. We had laughed our way through the challenges leaving us with many great and fun memories. There were many challenges and there was much laughter. In the end, we all were changed by this journey. Perhaps not in the ways that my husband set out for us to be changed but changed nonetheless.
As with mindfulness practice, if we can just sit with this journey exactly as it was and not with how we wished it had been there is much to be learned. I told my husband this evening that the lessons we can each learn from this might never have happened for us if it had been the"perfect family trip" he had hoped it would be. Perhaps we were meant to feel the fear, exhaustion, frustration, be there for one another, laugh until our bellies hurt as we struggled through things to learn what we were meant to learn. I like to believe that all happens exactly as it happens and it does.
