I’ve admitted to having resting bitch face (RBF): A medical condition (OK, I made that up) that afflicts women of a certain age causing our frowns to stay upside down unless we seek medical intervention in the form of fillers. What you don’t know is I also have restless mind syndrome (RMS), more commonly known as monkey mind. RMS is a newly identified disease recently discovered by the practitioner Patricia F. Hannum.
If you suffer from RMS, your mind never stops. The voices in your head (just to be clear, they’re your own voices) just keep talking. The more you try to quiet them, the louder they screech. When I try to take 10 deep breaths and think about ocean waves, my mind is sent into overdrive. Calm is not a feeling my brain has ever experienced. There is a variety of treatments for this condition, most of which I’ve tried. In case you also are a sufferer, let me save you some time.
Meditation often is suggested. So I signed up for a 30-day, online, guided course that would gently ease me into a state of peaceful bliss. I was excited to start, but I didn’t prepare. For the first day, I needed a quiet place to meditate. That could have been any number of places in my home, but I decided I needed to create a new meditation space. Which meant a trip to Arhaus to find the perfect meditation chair. I never found it, but I kept delaying the start of the course until I jumped in with both feet on day five. By day eight, I realized meditation wasn’t working, since my mantra had become, “Hurry up, I got stuff to do.” I don’t blame the course, or myself. I blame not having a meditation chair.
Aromatherapy was next. The aromatherapist listened intently as I described my inability to turn my brain off, especially at night. She suggested using her creation, Quiet Mind, along with lavender for spritzing my pillow. I love Quiet Mind. I sniff it often, usually right before I sit down to write. But it has the opposite effect on me. And the lavender on my pillow smells nice, even if it has done nothing to quiet my mind.
Finally, I attended a self-help workshop to show me how to ‘live in the present,’ even though I loathe any kind of organized self- improvement. When I worked full time, I used every excuse, including having a child, to avoid personal improvement courses. I cannot be coached, cajoled or encouraged to share my deepest thoughts. (In this column I’m sharing my next-to-deepest thoughts.) Yet I still did in this workshop! I guess I overshared, since I was told the kind of help my mind needed was not anything they offered. I failed self-help.
Last night as I laid in bed with another case of RMS/monkey mind—you can chose the term you prefer—I decided just to accept it. My condition has solved many problems, diagnosed (if not necessarily with accuracy) many medical conditions, and created lots of stories. And honestly, I am never lonely. I have far too many voices in my head talking to me, and sometimes they can be pretty entertaining.
