Alternate reality

For 6 years, I spent most of my days glued to the computer screen, only pausing at lunch to eat and chat with my colleagues. For 1 month in Nordic country I got called to coffee breaks twice a day in addition to lunch time to socialize with colleagues. The rest of the time I stayed silent and did my work in front of the computer. Now in Japan I'm in a bigger office with a lot more researchers and the place is way more lively than I'm used to: people chat with each other all day long. Suddenly I realized I am totally anti-social. I bump into colleagues on the bus and I don't know how to talk to them; I stay at work for long hours but nobody knows what I'm working on, not even myself. I feel the need to learn everything that's available, but the scope of the project is simply too broad. Must pick and choose only the relevant things to learn. I feel overwhelmed most of the time, even though nobody is pushing me to do anything. There's just too much going on, not to mention as soon as I step out of the institute buildings, nobody can speak English any more.

I feel like I live in this strange dimension everybody's super busy, so I feel the need to act busy too, but I'm a totally useless being here. I'm getting paid by a European institute; however the money is  guarded by a bank with way too many security checks to allow me to access it from Asia (I didn't manage to finish all the security steps including receiving my bank card before I got sent to Asia). So I'm currently living on borrowed money, in a totally foreign land, interacting mostly with foreign people who are not from the Asian continent (most of the Japanese don't really interact with the foreigners at work).

How did I go from an unemployed bum who spent her days rolling yoga mats, cleaning bathrooms and wiping floors at a serene yoga studio in exchange free yoga classes, to a dazed foreigner in a hyperactive research facility, where everybody takes on too many projects and the work mantra seems to be "get it all done; make it all work, no matter what it takes"?

Sorry if this post does not make sense. But I'm in a place where things don't exactly make sense. There are some smart phones out there that has a gazillion functions, but it's hard to the few basic features that most people would need are not all that user-friendly. Then there are the iPhone/iPad products which do not contain every single cool features that Android phones/tablets have, but are instead designed in a way such that the basic features that everybody needs are super user friendly. I kind of feel like I got dropped off at the company that creates smart phones with way too many features (and keeps pressuring its employees to cram in more features for the phone) and I'm supposed to "learn as much from these guys as possible".

It's definitely a better opportunity than being a jobless bum. As awesome as the yoga studio volunteer position seemed, the most it would have led to would be a receptionist position where I would get paid slightly better than minimum wage. Right now I've been suffering from a cold for more than 2 weeks; I don't eat that well (Japanese food is surprisingly salty); and I have no time or space for yoga. Why I'm compromising my health for this position I'm not sure. I guess I'm counting on the fact that I'm still young enough that my body can handle it. I don't hate my current situation; it just feels really abnormal. I don't understand how people can live their entire lives like this (guess it explains the drunks sprawled out on the floor of a train station at 10pm on a week night). The alternative would have been to take up a much crappier job back home, where work would suck, but life outside of work would be much more normal. Everything would be in English; the work hours would be more regular; food would be more familiar; I could keep my established weekly yoga routine + weekend snowboarding..... Gee that sounds pretty nice right now.

Except that yearning for a better job would always be there. It's funny I'm not even that ambitious about my career any more. I will just take this as an interesting life experience, and hope I don't get a massive reverse culture shock when I return to Europe in a few weeks.

Thoughts that come up when living in a foreign country

Being so far removed from family, I am feeling the effects of how much I got stepped all over by almost all members of my extended family all these years. Since I'm the youngest in the family, ever since I could remember, parents, uncles, aunts, cousins, sister + brother in-law have been offering me endless advice + suggestions on just about everything, from how to tie my shoe laces to how to dress myself to how much education I should get to when to get married. As a child I just assumed everybody knew better and took it all in. As I got older and got educated in the west I was totally surprised parents allowed their young children to choose their own outfits. Before the age of 10 I had zero say in what I could wear for any occasions to go out of the house. I absolutely despised my mother's taste in clothes. I guess sometimes the dresses would look fine on a more feminine looking girl but not on a tomboy like me with the ugliest hair cut in the world.

I grew up to become a total pushover. Whatever I decide about my own life can be super easily changed by a suggestion that my mother or my relatives. If my mother says I needed a haircut I'd suddenly become all insecure about how I look (turns out my mother's the insecure one, always telling me to dress nicer when I'm about to meet with this rich aunt, or when Chinese New Year is around the corner). It's amazing that for many years I believed that people offer me advice because they are looking out for me, not because it satisfies their own ego to offer their "words of wisdom" to the youngest one in the family.

Not saying I'm amazingly organized on my own. It's just that if I'm late, I experience the consequences for being late. When I was at home, my mother would take extreme measures so I am not late for some casual dinner with relatives. She'd tell me the wrong start time (6pm dinner when it actually was a 7pm dinner), tell me to be home by 5pm and then chain call me if I didn't make it home. If I did get home by 5pm she'd make me wait and do nothing for an hour, just so I wouldn't be late. She thought she was trying to build a habit of punctuality in me, but instead she just created resentment each time she did this (and this has happened countless times).

A couple of months before I moved to Europe, my mother tried to tell me how to pack in minute details. She also set a totally arbitrary packing schedule for me, which would only work if I woke up every single day and packed for 8 hours and didn't see any friends during the whole time. That totally did not happen, and our relationship just kept getting worse the last couple of months we spent together.  Right now I have no desire of meeting up with family any time in the near future. The thought of getting together with family brings up stressful feelings of everybody racing to tell me what's wrong with me, how I should behave and what I should do with my life.

I know that my family means well and they give advice to try to be useful. The thing is, first of all, I am not centered enough to objectively only take in advice I need and politely ignore the less useful suggestions. Secondly, I have to step back and objectively look at their lives. To be honest, none of them have lived a life that I envy, nor have they made personal choices that I wish to emulate. I used to think that because I should listen to their advice and learn from their mistakes, but in reality, I should only look to learn from role models, because they have also made plenty of mistakes, but whatever they did right got them to where they are right now.  I should never learn from people whose lives I don't want to emulate because either they never follow their own advice, or they've tried their own advice and failed, but somehow expect that piece of advice would work on me instead.

What got me started on this piece is that I've been meeting a lot of interesting people lately. Some have led successful lives and some have been more "experimental" with their lives. While I would definitely not recommend anybody to follow their paths, I'm happy for them that they weren't strongly discouraged to try different things (or maybe they were but they didn't oblige). I think as long as people practice "ahimsa" - do no harm to others and to oneself, one should be free to live the life one chooses (this is only possible for those who were lucky enough to be born into a liberal society).

I met a couple friends in their early/mid-20s who are currently grad students. They tell me that most of their friends are married with children. Depending on the size/location of the towns they're from, one tells me most of her friends didn't even go to college. Another tells me that her friend's parents strongly discouraged their kids to go to college and advised them that the most practical thing to do is to get married and have children as soon as possible after high school. This is the complete opposite of Asian cultures. I wonder where I would be if I were in their positions (would I still have been a pushover and complied?), and I wonder how these grad students I met managed to push through peer pressure and continue their educations.

Culture shock

Being immersed in a foreign culture always shocks all my systems: both the body (I've been battling with a nasty cold and jetlag for the past couple of days) and the mind (cognition overload when customs and languages are so different I don't exactly know how to act in so many situations).

So I am in Japan hanging out with a bunch of very interesting expats from various countries all over the world. I usually have no trouble handling this type of situations when I was in Canada, in Europe, and even in Taiwan. But here in Japan I must say it's kind of overwhelming. Japan's got such an interesting/strange simultaneous existence of extreme modernness and ultra-conservative demands on the society that it takes a certain type of personality for a foreigner to want to stay here for long term. I thought I was a master at handling complex and diverse cultural differences but I have to admit that I am in overload mode right now. No wonder Japanese invented zen gardens and zen meditation. I could use a huge dose of daily meditation from day 1 until the end of my stay.

I'm totally not saying I'm having a bad experience here; the experience is just so "foreign" to me that I'm having trouble putting my thoughts into coherent writing (although I generally have trouble with that anyways). People here are really nice. I can read kanji (Chinese characters) so even though I don't know Japanese at all I am not completely lost. Perhaps it's just been a really long week and I can only handle so many novel stimuli at once. One thing is for sure: a large western yoga studio/meditation center in the middle of Tokyo would probably make huge bucks because of the high level of stress people experience here. People here don't complain about their life style though; as a Japanese one must maintain an upbeat manner, politeness and friendliness at all times.

Let's see if I get over the initial cultural shock and can settle more into the Japanese working life style next week. Happy for this unexpected opportunity of learning experience but at the same time also glad it's only for a short term period.

  

Importance of Laughter in Life

Enjoyed a really fun night of laughter with a bunch of European students I've met for the first time in my life and many of whom I will never see again after this week. We spent a long day listening to what felt like a million academic talks, 2/3 of which I understood nothing; 1/3 of which I was too tired to absorb intellectually. When the torturous sessions were finally over, a couple of locals (by locals, I mean foreigners who have spend a few years here in Japan) took us visitors to an okonomiyaki restaurant for dinner. All of us sucked at cooking these Japanese pancakes things, but the dishes still tasted great even when burnt :) We had a great time laughing at how badly the food looked in our awkward hands - hands that type well, could create complex computer programs and perform advanced statistical analysis, but could not hold metal spatulas properly to save our lives (or preserve a delicious pancake), and I was noticing how all the stress hormones seem to wash away as I chucked hard every 5 minutes. It's kind of freaky how rare I get to laugh so hard for such a long period of time (the dinner lasted like 2 hours because we were so clumsy at cooking). It makes me a little sad that my regular life involves laughter so infrequently, but I am very grateful for the opportunity to bond with a bunch of strangers in a foreign city in the name of science.

Spiritual beings having a soulful experience

Awhile ago, I was reading "Many Lives, Many Masters", which talks about this woman he called "Catherine" who suffered from terrible nightmares and anxiety attacks. As Dr. Weiss, an American psychiatrist, try to learn about her childhood traumas using hypnosis, he was shocked that she spoke about previous reincarnations with striking details. As she disclosed these details to the doctor, Catherine's symptoms started to ease off in her day-to-day life. There were so many details she gave that began to convince Dr. Weiss that what she was describing were real, rather than made-up stories. What was more, some sort of "masters spirits" would talk through Catherine to Dr. Weiss about spiritual lessons.

I don't know about the literal truth of this story, whether we are all somewhat haunted by past reincarnations, that our current soulfulness is the result of an accumulations of lessons we have learned in our past lives, but the idea is interesting. Even if it's not literally true, this "Catherine" could have manifested the abstract anxieties in her brain in the form of these past live stories under hypnosis. By expressing her anxieties as stories, she was able to digest and accept her issues and let go of the symptoms.

Catherine, the poor woman, went through many many reincarnations (either real or perceived by her) as a slave, a maid, or a servant. Sometimes she spent  entire life times just being angry about her existence as an oppressed being of a bottom level social class; sometimes she learned something from her existence. According to her stories, groups of souls tend to reincarnate together. For example, Dr. Weiss had been in her life before a few times, usually as her teacher and guide. Her mother and father's souls have also repeatedly reincarnated with her.

Some key points I've picked up from spiritual teachings of Dr. Brian Weiss and Seane Corn:

- We are all spiritual beings coming into a human body to have a soulful experience. Everything we have experienced in our lives, especially the most negative/terrible ones, are meant to teach the soul a lesson to transcend it to a higher level. 

- The group of souls that reincarnate together repeatedly are meant to teach each other important lessons. For example, if my mother and I have some serious issues with each other, we should really try to resolve it in this life time. If we just leave it as is, the same conflicts will just repeat itself again in a future life time. 

- Sometimes we meet beautiful beings with the terrible sufferings: for example, a child with severe mental retardation, a sibling with cystic fibrosis and does not live past the age of 25 -- these are actually advanced souls taking a short trip into the world in order to help inspire and advance other souls around them.

I talk about all this because I'm trying to interpret what I experienced today. This evening, I enjoyed a really nice Japanese dinner with a big group of researchers from different parts of Europe. It seems like for many European graduate schools, the PhD program is only 3-4 years, and one is required to publish 3-4 papers during this time. What this means is that the majority of Europeans can get their PhD in their late 20s, and with a bunch of publications in hand, they would not have trouble advancing to the next level in their scientific careers. 

Contrast this with my experience, where I spent 6 years, published next to nothing, was on the verge of quitting science all together and actually seriously considered becoming a yoga teacher instead (and maybe pick up a side job to supplement income). Many of my Canadian colleagues (and perhaps Americans as well) share similar experience with me (except not the yoga part).

It's not even about how far I get in my career; it's about how much damage the 6 years of unproductiveness does to the self-esteem. I'm trying to figure out why I (plus a whole continent of grad students) had to go through this long path while others in the world can cruise through their academic careers. What am I supposed to learn from this? How do I figure out what I have learned, and promptly let go of my negativity and bitterness? Catherine clung on to negative experiences in her previous life times without being able to enjoy the present one until she got help from Dr. Weiss; I seem to have the tendency to cling on pretty tightly to my negative past experiences of this life time. Can I learn from her stories and try to let it all go? 

This week I am supposed to network with a lot more researchers from different parts of the world and learn a ton of geeky science from them. But somehow I feel the more important lessons I have to learn from them is not the technical science stuff, but to pick up tips on how to live life from such a diverse group of people I normally will never get to meet if I hadn't taken up this job. Oh by the way, did I mention I am in Japan?

What an amazing opportunity and tonight I couldn't seem to let go of my past. I have to find a way to stop holding on to bitter memories and embrace the precious present moment.

New job, no yoga practice

I meant to blog so many times but it never happened. It's what happens when I have to learn so much new things on a computer.. no desire to do non-work stuff on computer after I go home. Having no internet connection at home also discourages blogging.

I'm working in Europe right now. Getting paid less than local PhD students. So I'm the cheap foreign labor.... now I get a taste of how immigrants from 3rd world country feel like moving to a 1st world country (a mixture of gratitude, awe, homesickness, and some bitterness). So why did I sign up for this job? Well, the project is much bigger scale than most of the research I've seen in Canada. I am given the opportunity to work on something "hot" in the field for which I have very little hands-on experience. How could I resist? The upside to my job is that the office is super fancy, with those ergonomic chairs that can be adjusted in 100 different ways.  I get a giant computer screen and a fancy MacBook. I will just pretend that a gigantic part of my salary went to pay for these fancy items, and that's why my pay check is so tiny at the end of the month.

I went from dreamy-eyed "oh my gawwwwwd everything is so pretty in this European city" in the first week to an anxiety attack today, angry why the locals weren't more helpful (coz they don't know how it feels like to move to a foreign country and they were expecting the new colleague to be an expert, not a total rookie who needs step-by-step instructions on how to use the computer). It's kind of fascinating how I've been thinking myself to total happiness, being super thankful for getting this job, and to have a boss who actually cares about his employees. Today on the way home I managed to think myself to tears, because I thought I lost my wallet, and then I thought about how I've been having so much trouble applying for a local residence permit, how I don't have the same rights and benefits of EU citizens so wtf am I doing in Europe; how everyone here seems to be so happy with friends and family while I'm all alone, that it's too cold for October, etc etc ( you can see the negative vortex of dark thoughts dragging me deeper and deeper towards misery). I'm not sure why my brain does this to me, even though my actual situation hasn't changed much since I arrived here. Perhaps it was because of the unproductive struggle I had with the computer server today.

Yoga doesn't seem all that popular here. I suddenly miss home, where there are a million activities available, including a new parcour gym that just opened up, not to mention other fun activities like Zumba, the Bar Method, Jazzercise, Acroyoga, my lovely studio with all my yoga teacher friends and fellow yogis. I don't really know what people do here besides jogging and and biking to and from work. North America seems much better at profiting from people's desire to try out new things to get a good work out. Too bad there are no decent jobs in my field back home where I live. Other colleagues from my field are all struggling to find work or they put up with less than ideal job positions. I guess one must choose to either strike a balance or put more weight on either career advancement or life comforts. I chose the former while my friends/excolleagues chose the latter. Nobody can be 100% satisfied all the time I guess.

Will try to blog more frequently about my life musings. In the mean time, I will keep struggling with waking up on time (I've been a depressed, unemployed bum for 9 months and it's been difficult adjusting to the 9-5 life styles again) and making progress at work.

Also, I really need to snap myself out of it whenever I think myself into a hopeless, bitter, depressing corner again.

My experience with an anti-depressant while practicing yoga

In my previous post, I wrote about how I had these crying spells despite the fact that my life situation was going quite well. I was trying to make sense of why I was acting so immaturely and hating myself for it. Since then I had gone to my family doctor, who diagnosed this situation as a major depressive episode (ie. being utterly depressed for no apparent reason). He prescribed me anti-depressants, which I took because I was convince there was something seriously wrong with me ("chemical imbalance", as the doctor said).

I had wanted to blog about my experience with the anti-depressant, because it was quite unlike any other drugs I've taken (granted I've only taken pain-killers, antibiotics, muscle relaxants, and maybe some anti-histamine). Before I decided to take the drug, I went through forum discussions and some blogs of SSRI users, and found that many people have been cycling through various anti-depressant SSRI drugs for decades. Some people describe how the drugs have changed their lives for the better (a dark cloud that had been over their heads all their lives has been lifted); others talk about how nothing really works; the side-effects are shitty, but they keep accepting new prescriptions when a new anti-depressant/anti-anxiety/anti-psychotic drug comes out in the market.

My experience was unlike what the doctor/pharmacist had described. Instead of taking 4-6 weeks for the drug to become fully affective, I thought it was the most effective in the first 2 weeks. I could sleep through the night for the first time in years; I was brightly alert first thing in the morning, and whenever a depressing thought arose, instead of tears + the whole crying mechanism kicking into gear straight away, I experienced a lag, and the the tears just didn't come. It was fascinating.

However, the downside was that in my yoga practice, I got dizzy all the time. For those who access my Yoga Dizziness post (this is the most accessed entry of all my blog posts), please check if you are taking SSRIs or other drugs that act on your neurotransmitters. When I took that pranayama course with the great Srivatsa Ramaswami, I was dozing off in the class (a side effect of the drug) even though I desperately wanted to hang on to every word he said. The drug made me feel like I had an electric current running through my body. Well, doing pranayama exercises made me feel like an over-charged battery.

My life situation was improving even more during the period I was on the drugs. Previously, I was dreading the job hunting process because none of the job posts that I felt qualified for had descriptions that excited me. I got an interview for a job that I thought was WAY out of my league. During the interview, it was revealed to me that the nature of the job was much more exciting than what was written in the job advertisement, and it's located in a super exotic location. Even though I felt like I totally bombed my interview, my interviewer (soon to be my boss) wrote an email a couple days later to say I got accepted for the position.

On top of that, I started volunteering at my old yoga studio, which was actually the most healing experience I could ever prescribe for myself. The people there, be it my supervisor, the guest services people, the massage therapists, yoga teachers, and every single customer who walks into that studio, were just ridiculously nice. If I didn't go through this whole grad school thing and if I didn't get this incredible job, I'd probably just apply to work there forever. Who cares if they only pay like $12/hr? The happiness and job satisfaction made me feel like a million bucks.

So I went back to my family doctor, beaming and all bright eyed, saying I didn't need to take the drug any more. I didn't mention that the SSRI was ruining my yoga practice experience but that's the main reason I wanted to get off of it. Plus the initial effects were wearing after 1 month. I started waking up in the middle of the night again, and I would have small crying spells again over arguments with mom. The doctor was very reluctant to let me off. He attributed my 180° change in attitude (The last time I walked into his office and bursted out crying when he casually asked "how are you?") to the drug. I would say it's a combination of my life situation and the drug, but the whole dizzy thing made me feel like the drug was making me sick in a whole different way.

So he halved the dose and told me to take it for 7 days and observe what happens afterwards. So a few days after I stopped taking the drug completely, I started feeling like a leaky battery. When I was a kid I once licked one of those small batteries. It tasted like acid and the yucky feeling permeated my whole body. That's what stopping the drug felt like. It negatively affects my yoga practice in a different way, in that I no longer feel like blacking out or dizzy, but sometimes I feel I don't have full control of my muscles and that I might lose control and fall (I don't but it feels like I could collapse any time). So I have to take another 5mg pill when that happens. It's stretched to one pill every couple of weeks now. I'm running out of the drug and I'm about to move out of the country for my new job. Let's hope this withdrawal period ends soon. 

I don't regret trying out the anti-depressant. It allowed me to realize that the whole physical sensations associated with depressing thoughts can be decoupled. It makes me empathize with those who have to take stronger psychiatric medications. The new-generation SSRIs are pretty mild and harmless, and I already don't fully feel like myself while on it. I can only imagine that drugs designed for schizophrenic/bipolar/serious anxiety attack patients would have way stronger side effects. Doctors may feel that it is essential for these patients to stay on these drugs than for them to act out and seriously harm themselves and/or those around them, but sometimes the acting out feels more familiar, more like the "self", whereas the drugs make one feels like parts of the automatic body mechanisms are being disrupted.  It's hard to distinguish the drug's actual effects vs. placebo effects on mood. I found the drug had significant effects on my sleeping patterns and my appetite. I was sleeping through the night better, but I would dose of at random times of the day, which was annoying. It also decreased my appetite, which decreased my desire to munch on sugary junk food and helped me lose some weight (major plus)! Mood-wise, I felt a lift in the first two weeks, but I also felt like I had a shot of caffeine in my blood stream and walked around with eyes so wide they felt like they were propped open by long toothpicks). So the drug acted more in an indirect way rather than directly made me happier. Now that I've been off of it for nearly a month, I threw some major mood tantrums again, but I don't plan to get back on it, because again, the body sensations during yoga + pranayama sessions told me that being on this drug is not the body's natural state. Now, apparently people's reactions to the drugs vary wildly,  and I know for a fact that these drugs have positively changed many people's livs for the better, so don't take my words for your case. I would say I am the atypical case, because I never wanted to be dependent on the drug in the first place. I sometimes take pleasure in wallowing in sadness (the "playing victim" syndrome). I chose to try the drug for self-experimentation purposes. I would say that if you are seriously suffering from depression and your doctor offers you a prescription, you should give it a try; just don't expect it to miraculously fix everything. It's more like an assistant, just like yoga practice provides assistance but does not guarantee life-long happiness.