Just wanted everyone to know that while there is still plenty of information to read here at Normal in Training, as there are over 400 posts, the majority of my new material can be found in two places:
Normal in Training Podcast will contain podcasts and access to the original posts found here at Normal in Training so that you can multitask while catching up on all of the posts you’ve missed. And I will be reading them so you can also hear how they were meant to be read. I can’t add the entire blog to podcast lists until all of the sessions have been recorded, but I am adding a session a day, so you can get your daily dose if you subscribe to the blog for now.
NEUROSPICY AND FLYING will contain all of my latest blog posts. Some of the posts about neurodivergence that I wrote about here at Normal in Training can be found in that blog, too. So if you’d like to keep up with my new material, please subscribe to that blog.
I have to say, it’s a little sad to be writing my last post here. But you can always find me on basically every social media platform using Normal in Training, because that’s still me. Except instead of training to be normal, I’ve got my training wheels on because I’m learning how to fly. And I want to take you with me so that we can all fly together. So hope to see you on social media and at NEUROSPICY AND FLYING!
I’ve had an ambivalent relationship with prayer throughout most of my blog. I know “the World is not a wish granting factory, as John Green indicates in The Fault in Our Stars. Still, even atheists will resort to prayer at times when they’re feeling desperate. And while I know that God probably doesn’t care about any particular sports team or player winning, I can’t help but pray for some kind of outcome, even if it isn’t directly about winning.
This post was originally written on October 13, 2013. If you’d like to read the original post, you can do so here.
Despite playing tennis on and off since I was 10, I struggle to believe that I’m an athlete, which people think is crazy. And I guess it kind of is, but my logic is the typical logic that clients have that makes them believe all kinds of things that sell themselves short.
The original post was written on October 10, 2023. You can read the full post here.
After talking about politics with Sadie from ages 8 to 19 for a few episodes, I decided to switch to talking about Sadie’s love for all things creative. Which is where her passion has always been since she was an infant, sitting in her crib, entertaining herself with stories until someone came to get her. Similar to the previous episode, I share her my memories of those times and ask her what her experience was like from the child’s, and now adolescent’s, perspective.
I got my gift on August 15. It was hip replacement surgery. I told the orthopedic surgeon at my three month follow up that he didn’t save my life, but he gave me my life back. Because I love tennis, and I have been living without it for six years. I thought that I was never going to be able to play again.
I was glad I could thank him in person. I also calculated the number of surgeries that he’s done. I estimated it to be 28,000. If you could add 800 every year. Just in case he ever encounters someone as obsessive as me. 🙃
I’ve been having moments of synchronicity lately. According to Jung, moments of synchronicity are meaningful coincidences that signify an opportunity to cultivate a deeper connection between the mind and the universe. They often occur in times of crisis and are opportunities for growth.
Most of my moments of synchronicity involve people with whom I am having similar epiphanies. We are going through similar crises, and we are using our self-awareness, our talents, and our minds to find out how to make the life that we want happen.
For example, I was going to write a post on gift-giving the other night, but a book that I’ve had on hold, The Serviceberry, by Robin Wall Kimmerer, became available. I saw that the book was only 2 hours long, and I’m behind on listening to 4 books a month, so I thought I’d knock it out to try to get back on track. I wasn’t sure what it was about, but I loved Braiding Sweetgrass, and she was featured in one of my meditations when they were focusing on gratitude that week. So I was confident I would like it.
Talk about synchronicity! In the book, the author differentiates between gift economies, which are based on the philosophy of abundance and promote gratitude, reciprocity, and community. Which is exactly what I was going to write a blog post about. She compares gift economies to economies that are based on scarcity, which result in competition, hoarding of resources, and surrendering our values so that we actually harm what we love.
A good example of this would be toilet paper at the beginning of the COVID pandemic. Even though people had no idea about anything related to COVID, they figured they better go out and buy all the toilet paper that is available in their local grocery store. And maybe some other grocery stores nearby.
And even after people found out that COVID does not cause GI difficulties that result in a need for extra toilet paper, thereby making it unnecessary to hoard toilet paper, it was still hard to buy toilet paper for months. Because the attitude was, screw all of you! I’ve got my toilet paper so I’m going to be OK if I have COVID because I beat you to the punch!
By the way, the CDC advised against going to the grocery store and buying all the things in a state of panic. But what do they know? It’s a dog eat dog world out there!
In contrast, when Hurricane Helene hit North Carolina in the fall of 2024 so badly that it wiped out all the roads and no emergency personnel could reach rural communities, these communities shared what little resources they had with one another until they could get help. Gift economy.
Kimmerer, who is Potawatomi, gives an example in which someone says something to a man in their tribe like, why don’t you make preserves out of the berries so you can have some for later? In reply, the Native American gentleman says something like, I store the berries in the belly of my brother. Because what good does it do me to have more berries than I need if my brother is hungry? The non-Native American thought Native Americans weren’t very smart and that they probably aren’t going to survive. (Which is true historically because of the Trail of Tears.)
Kimmerer also gives an example of how in an economy of scarcity, we take something like water, which is freely given by Mother Earth, and turn it into something scarce by polluting it. For example, some companies dump their waste into water reserves so that it is no longer safe to drink. So now the only way to have water that is safe to drink is to buy bottled water. Except everyone can’t afford to buy bottled water. Or food, for that matter.
In fact, when there are natural disasters like hurricanes, people go out and buy all the bottled water in every store they can get to and hoard it, just like they do with toilet paper, now that I think about it.
If you’e interested in reading this book yourself, Kimmerer is donating all presales of the book to organizations that protect and restore land.
What I was going to share about gift-giving is that I realized that turning my blog into a book is only the first step of doing what God wants me to do to fulfill my purpose. The book will allow me to have an opportunity to promote its release by providing workshops that will be called Normal in Training: Teaching Adults How to Rest and Play.
Because they already know how to work. In fact, that’s the problem with enjoying life in today’s world. We spend so much time making money to survive if you’re poor, or accumulating wealth if you’re rich, that we don’t spend enough time resting and playing.
But to live a full life, according to one of those weekly meditations I mentioned earlier, this Native American spiritual leader said that in their culture, work, rest, and play are all equally important. I don’t know about you, but I think that’s pretty brilliant. Which is why I decided to give these workshops.
In the workshops, my co-author and I will present our unique knowledge bases. My knowledge base relevant to the workshops is positive psychology, therapy, mindfulness, and self-compassion. My co-author’s knowledge base relevant to the workshops is service dogs, art, publishing, organizing presentations, and wisdom, since she is 76 years old.
We’ll explain why rest and play are important to prioritize mental health and allow you to enjoy your life rather than to work until you die.
Or why it’s important to do things now instead of wish you could do them if you had more time.
Or to decide that in order to take care of everyone else, you have to take care of yourself first.
Or to decide that the money you were going to spend on upgrading your Mercedes Benz might be better utilized on something that gives you time to connect with yourself, to the people you love, and to something greater than yourself–like nature, or another culture, or whatever you like to take a deep dive into.
And then we will start the activities, which will be like an adult version of a day in kindergarten. Because we’re healing our inner child by letting that child rest and play.
The morning will be divided into 3 types of workshops, depending on the skills that my clients have in the city that the workshop will be held in. They will include: 1) something related to art, 2) something related to bodily awareness, and 3) something related to self-awareness.
There will be several options in each category to choose from. And if you want to do more than one, luckily for you, they will all be streamed and participants will have access to the recording as part of their registration fee.
After lunch, there will be afternoon workshops that people can pay extra for. They will vary from city to city, based on what my clients and I use to self-regulate. They will include things like short yoga sessions, massage sessions, stretching sessions, mindfulness coaching, pickleball lessons, singing lessons, creative writing lessons, UGC creator lessons, and acting lessons.
Since no one is required to do anything they don’t want to do, there will be a quiet room in case people are overstimulated. There will be pop-up stores that my clients own. There will be food for breakfast, a mid-morning snack, lunch, a mid-afternoon snack, and an optional dinner that participants can attend to get to know other people in the workshop.
The food will be provided by clients who started their own business or by local vendors who are trying to compete with big businesses.
You can also choose to spend your time asking local vendors about their yoga studio, massage studio, pickleball club, mediation center, pottery studio, knitting/crochet group, etc.
There will be a local bookstore where people can buy our book, Neurospicy and Thriving, as well as books that my co-author and I think are important to read.
There will be a local craft store where you can buy supplies for a beginning art project, and one of our art experts will help you get started.
There will be a store where you can make your own emotional first aid kit. This tool kit is essential for self-soothing once you have become dyregulated and you’re thinking brain has gone off-line.
There will be a place where you can download free art into a book, a magnet, a mug, or whatever you want. You will only have to pay for whatever it costs to make the item, and you can make a donation for whatever you think that item is worth.
All participants will also have the program in which every vendor will have an ad so that if they decide later they want to use one of the vendors that was at the workshop, they will know how to contact them.
Even clients who don’t have a store or a skill yet all want to start learning how to do something that they’ve always wanted to do but never made it a priority, like knitting. So that when the workshop comes to their city in a few years, they can lead the workshop on learning how to knit. It is making my clients step out of their comfort zone and do all the things they’ve always wanted to do but never had the time or the courage to try.
I also tell clients that their presence in the workshop alone is proof that we can all learn how to enjoy life. Because when they tell their story about where they were when they started therapy and how they got to where they are now, participants are going to be like, whoa! It’s really possible!
This is an example of a gift economy. You give based on your talents, and what you receive is even greater than what you give. Because that’s how reciprocity works.
But we’re not giving to receive. We’re giving because we want to help other people who felt just like we did in our lowest moment, so that they know that it can get waaayyy better. And we will all show you how to do it. You will have lots of options and choices.
This workshop will be coming to a city near you. But first we have to finish writing and publishing the book. And then, you are all going to learn how to thrive. If you want to. No pressure. You have free will.
So stay tuned!
P.S. This was in my meditation the night I wrote this post:
I have decided to stick to love…Hate is too great a burden to bear.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
I’ve never been one to watch the news. I tried to change this after I was in grad school when I didn’t know that the whole Waco thing happened. And I didn’t know that we were going to have an eclipse and was wondering why the sky looked so weird, as I looked right up into the sun without any protective eye wear. My fellow students asked me if I lived under a rock. I guess I was in my own world, sticking to reruns of The Brady Bunch and Gilligan’s Island over CNN.
Now I don’t even try to watch the news–and I get minimal notifications on my phone–but I am not ashamed of it at all. In my line of work, I have to save my energy to see my clients, and I can’t allow the intense negativity of every update take up residence in my brain. I rely on my family and my clients to tell me if something important is happening, like if China is floating a balloon across the U.S. to spy on us. Maybe it makes me uninformed, but sometimes ignorance is bliss.
Still, despite the lengths I go to protect my energy, it’s impossible not to feel the divide in our country. I know we have always been a country divided, but I had never felt it so keenly as I have since Covid. And although we may no longer be living in a pandemic, pandemonium still feels very close at hand.
In every religion they say that love is the only force that can conquer hate, and it is our job to spread love. And it’s up to us to say yes to that job and to do it in a way that uses our unique talents. I know that I was supposed to become a therapist because since I’ve gone into private practice clients that I’ve seen decades ago have reached out to me to work with me again, saying I changed their lives. Yet most of the time I was at my old job I felt like a terrible therapist. The clients that I’ve seen since I’ve moved to Knoxville have said the same thing, even though the first year and a half of my time here was perhaps the darkest period of my life. Somehow, although I was barely able to function in every other area in my life, I was still able to help people. This is not about me. It’s about God. God has made sure that I’m able to do what I’m supposed to do in this lifetime–to help others in need.
But lately, with the country being divided and both sides full of hatred, pointing fingers, I feel the need to step it up a notch. I’ve started doing the lovingkindness meditation, which is a Buddhist practice in which you cultivate your ability to be loving, even to your enemies. The reason why I like it so much is that it’s empowering. I can put in the work to become a more loving person. I can make this happen. I have to admit, I’m not as diligent about doing it as I would like. It’s a lot like exercise–you have to be committed to the process. And sometimes after work I’m just too exhausted to do it.
I can feel it changing me, though, even practicing lovingkindness imperfectly. I’ll often teach clients how to do the lovingkindness mediation when they need a way to feel empowered, and for those who try this or their own spiritual practice, it changes them, too. I imagine there are more people out there who are looking for the same thing. Who want to do something other than feel anger, helplessness, and fear. Maybe there are people who want send out love to the universe but haven’t figured out how to do so yet. So I thought, well hey! Maybe there are some people out there who might want to do the lovingkindness meditation with me. I think that doing it in a group is probably similar to what Jesus said about 2 or more people praying together. It makes it more powerful. Even if one person joins me, it doubles the amount of lovingkindness that goes out into the universe. And who knows? Maybe there will be even more.
So if you think this might be a practice that you’d like to try out, I’ve decided that if even one person wants to do the lovingkindness meditation with me, I’m going to host a 30 minute Zoom meeting weekly where we can practice together. In the first 10-15 minutes I’ll teach you how to do it and construct your own mediation. And in the last 15 minutes, we’ll practice it together, silently. Or you can do whatever practice you’d like, if something resonates better with you.
If you’d like to try it out, email me at cbarongan@gmail.com and I’ll send you the day, time, and Zoom link. No obligation to stay the whole time or to come back if it’s not for you. But I hope there are some people out there who are willing to give it a shot. God knows we need it.
