I had a pretty tough day at work, where I found out that one of my "teammates" had undone a bunch of work I had finished last week. When I asked about it, he said, "I messed around in there, what can I say? You can just do it over can't you? It's only a couple of commands."
When I got home, I decided to do a healing mediation. With the dogs.
I've only found one meditation practice that I can do without losing patience or mind-wandering. It involves listening to a musical composition by Kay Gardner called "The Rainbow Path" and visualizing the colors of the rainbow one by one floating through your body. That's it.
Tonight, I thought I'd try the meditation while walking slowly on the treadmill, thus also doing a little exercise to shake out the tension.
The composition is in eight movements.
After the first few minutes, Joey wants to be picked up, so I put her in my under my shirt and tuck it into my sweatpants to hold her like a kangaroo baby and put the headset back on. Joey goes to sleep.
Halfway through the first movement, Woodley comes in and wants to get on the recliner next to the treadmill. I unhook from the treadmill and headphones, pick her up and put her on the chair. (She's a dachshund and too short to jump up herself.) Back to the meditation.
I start to wonder where Captain is. I open my eyes and she is standing in the doorway looking puzzled at me, and wanting to be part of whatever it is that the dachshunds are doing. I take the headphones off and call to her: "Do you want to walk with me?" She gets on the treadmill behind me, walks tentatively and seems to be liking it. I put the headphones back on, but can't really concentrate--I was in the middle of the second movement by now--because Captain keeps walking too far behind me. I have to stay too close to the front or else she will slip off the back.
When the second movement ends, I worry Captain is feeling trapped on the treadmill and can't get off, and just then Joey wakes up and starts to scratch her way through the neck of my tee shirt. Woodley appears to be judging the distance to the floor from the chair, and I remember that the purpose of this project was to meditate, so I might as well give up the dual goal of getting exercise at the same time.
I step off, pick up Captain and set her on the floor, turn the treadmill off, unhook myself, put Joey on the floor, pick up Woodley and climb into the chair with her. Joey wants to get up too, and Captain wanders off.
I put the headphones back on and start the third movement. Joey pierces my breast and neck with her little piston legs and tries to lick all the salt of my face, but I don't let her. I find the controls to the chair and tipped it back. We three rest there for a while and I get back into the meditation, when Captain comes back in. She puts her paws on the chair but can't up on when it is tilted back, so I fumble for the controls again and tilt it down so she can join us.
By the middle of the fourth movement we finally figure out where everyone was going to lie. Captain is on the lower part, between my legs, Joey is on my right side and stomach, and Woodley is on my left thigh with her head in the crock of my arm. She has adjusted herself away from Joey so that my hand follows her head off the chair and supports it.
By the end of the fifth movement my hand and arm is asleep, but I can't move it because it would disturb the dog.
In the middle of the sixth movement, the cat comes in. She considers the recliner her throne, and she was quite surprised to see four Subjects in it. She meows her surprised indignancy, and Joey starts to charge her. I covered her eyes for the rest of the movement and kept her in check.
The seventh movement is particularly difficult to meditate through because it is sort of "modern," that is to say, it has a melody that only a music theorist could follow. I do my best, and by the end of the eighth movement, Captain and Joey have decided to take off, so I am able to move Woodley off my arm and bring it back to life.
| ... Comments made afterwards |