Your psalm: An Elul return

In recovering from COVID, I learned from a dear friend and mentor who asked for my Hebrew name and age: you have a psalm.

Well, we all have a psalm, every year. When praying for someone to recover from illness, you recite the Psalm numbered their age + 1.

I love this; a psalm to call home, in which to seek shelter from malady that acknowledges a bit of yourself, with growth and forward progress each year of life.

It’s a little funny to me that I didn’t know this association before. I have been enchanted with psalms for years, particularly their association with times of vulnerability such as illness and dying. I’ve studied them. I’m thinking about writing a book about them.

This time of year, Elul, the season of tshuva (return/repentance) is also a time of vulnerability particularly appropriate for spiritual connection through psalm practice. We read Psalm 27 every service starting in Elul and lasting through the entire season, and Elul is also associated as part of some observance with more intensive recitation of the entire book of psalms. Something in psalms, I believe, helps us tap into the purest version of ourselves, which is what we “return” to when we review our souls each year, looking for ways we’ve missed the mark and seeking forgiveness from those we’ve harmed.

Last year I did a deep dive into psalms using this book/app. The app, “Opening your heart with psalm 27,” includes a daily inspiration, a prompt question, a 5 minute meditation timer, and opening and closing ritual. I did these and also added extra “psalm study” to this practice, studying each psalm 1-150, a few per day to last for the season of repentance.

I always know whenever I start a new “good habit,” system, or routine, that it’s a temporary game I am playing with myself.* Sometimes I’ll drop it in a few days, which comes with a pang of shame and a small brick in the “wall of awful.” If it catches for longer than that, the next thing that happens is a temporary euphoria that I’ve managed to accomplish a semblance of consistency, and hope that maybe, maybe, this is the thing that will stick. This euphoria motivates me for a few more weeks. Then anxiety will creep in as I start wondering when I will drop this thing that I’ve begun to cherish. Because I will drop it; I just don’t know when, and don’t get to decide when. Usually it’s some external disruptor; an illness, a trip, a broken appliance…so my brain starts to guard reflexively against potential triggers that will throw me off the thing I’ve finally started to do right.

Then, eventually, usually between 6 weeks – 3 months, but sometimes up to a year, I’ll drop it, and shame / bigger “wall of awful” bricks set in.

I credit “Opening Your Heart with Psalm 27” with the most positive mental shifts I’ve ever accomplished in my life. It gave me a morning routine and positive self-care practice that gave me a glimmer of hope that I actually can accomplish sustained self-discipline.

But as with everything else, it did not last.

To be fair, it wasn’t meant to. The app’s “end date” was a feature and not a bug in the sense that the app was contained in terms of time frame–this meant that I had a chance of not failing at it, which no doubt was the very thing that got me to not fail at it. But as I got closer and closer to the “end” of it, I started panicking. What would I be without these morning moments where prompts were gently fed to me in manageable doses? This little psalm practice, 5-minute meditation and all (you have no idea how crazy it is that I meditated for 5 minutes daily for 2+ months) worked for me. Like nothing else in my life ever had. People like my husband and father were noticing a difference in me. What would I do when it was over? And wouldn’t the crash, with all the shame and wall of awful bricks, be worse than previous failures?

The holidays ended; I explored other apps and solutions. Surely all I needed was a daily journaling prompt and a meditation timer. Surely, this existed somewhere. It didn’t, though, not in the precise way that the Psalm 27 app combined these things for me. I dumped money into “Fabulous” which had a meditation prompt that seemed to work but was otherwise toxic behavior science… and “stoic” which was the antithesis of “fabulous” but also was both more and less than what I needed. I bought an actual journal with prompts. No perfect fit… in the meantime I kept up for a time with sitting on my porch, meditating for 5 minutes, and studying Torah / saying a psalm for a WhatsApp group praying for someone recovering from kidney surgery, and also for IDF soldiers post-Oct 7.

Even as I felt myself losing interest, I kept it up… I thought, studying the weekly Torah portion was a good way to “pick up where Psalms left off.” It took more energy because no one was feeding me prompts, I had to create my own structure. I could feel myself slipping slowly slowly …

And then one day it was too cold to sit outside. So I sat at my desk and forced myself to do the thing I’d been doing outside. And I did it. Ok. Good job!

Whenever it was warm enough to sit outside I sat outside. But more and more, it was too cold. But my inside desk was messy. I couldn’t hear the birds or smell the air. It wasn’t private; I did not feel alone or in a space of solace. There was no other space in my house that was remotely suitable. And I had finally gotten much-needed paid-work prospects that demanded my urgent attention like a small child, pulling on my leg, activating my nervous system, the 5-minute meditation that fueled my sanity slipping into the rearview mirror.

And then it was gone; I thought, ok, I’ll start back up when it’s nice outside, but as winter faded into spring somehow a bunch of ladybugs started dying daily on the table where I meditated. More fires to put out, which I can never resist.

I did not start meditating again. I did somehow manage to keep going to the gym. I’m quite proud of myself for this, and I celebrate the success.** But a lot of my negative habits, my impulsivity, my challenges in certain types of relationships, had returned. A few months back an app called “Structured” seem to stick in the way I described above, and I was able to incorporate sporadic/occasional meditation sessions into it, which was good, but not consistent.

And before I knew it, Rosh Chodesh Elul was upon me again. Could it be? And I had no plan. Last year by Rosh Chodesh Elul I’d already been on my porch for two days, excited at the hopeful prospect of the journey, of taking a little control of my chaotic, frenetic, fluttery soul. This year, I’m juggling the equivalent of three full time jobs and taking on the “primary afternoon parent” role for two kids in the throes of “after school activity” years. Have I really gone backwards?

But what is Tshuva if not “return”? So I returned … to “Opening Your Heart with Psalm 27.” It’s a little like coming home; the same prompts–sadly the app seems to have quietly erased all my writings from last year!! (lesson learned)–the same seat on my porch, the same birds chirping and fresh fall-onset air. The same playlist of Eliana Light, Chava Mirel, Aly Halpert and Will Robertson. The same little bin with my psalm books, a pencil, and a notebook.

And yet not the same – I’m rushing through it, going through the motions a bit; haven’t solidified a connection with waking up or morning routine… punctuated with a giant trip + COVID right in the middle of it, causing me to skip a whole week of it.

But to my delight, the apps’ 5-minute meditation timer with its daily graphics still feels like a fit, even if I remember the graphics from last year; the daily prompts still grounding for my meditation time and journaling, even though I remember those prompts from last year.

I can come back; I can return.  The wall of awful becomes a little more climbable, psalm by psalm.

***

*Gamifying being an ADHD survival tactic. Without belaboring too much my opinions about the limitations of modern diagnoses and the extreme harm of labeling… I have some extreme and lifelong ADHD traits and I have benefited from seeing myself through that framing, which offers me a window to self-compassion that previously did not exist. It is only my understanding of my ADHD brain that has rescued me from the self-loathing that characterized my youth and early adulthood. But I also think that ADHD, like frankly most brain-related descriptors, is an imperfect construct that science will eventually prove we got horribly wrong. So I use this term with curiosity / open mindedness to framings that go beyond authoritative Western medicine, for example, Gabor Mate’s “Scattered.”

**I did this by habit stacking gym with showers, btw – e.g., I don’t get to shower unless I go to the gym. On days when I really don’t have time to go to the gym but need a shower, I will work out for less time, but keep up the muscle memory.