Wake Up Before Your Wake-Up Call: The Five Pillars for Deeper Love, Joy, and Connection in Midlife

By Toni Parker

Do you wake up most mornings and go along with the day as usual, taking for granted that things will unfold the way they always have? Do you go through your days on autopilot, with no real thought that something life-changing could happen at any moment? By the time we reach our middle years, many of us have established well-worn patterns and habits that no longer serve us -- from what we eat to how we relate to others, to how we take care of our bodies or the environment, to how we express compassion for the whole web of living beings. Yet many times our bodies are sending us feelings and sensations meant to wake us up as if from sleepwalking, so that we can be more attuned and alive to our experiences, aligned with our values, and alert to the impulse to change before calamity happens. Through real-life examples and practical exercises for meditation and self-reflection, Toni Parker unpacks the five pillars for waking up: Body Sensation Awareness, Mind Kindness, Emotional Equanimity, Self-Compassion, and Waking Up to the World. She shows readers how to identify the signs and offers proven strategies for tuning in to the telltale whispers and sensations that alert us to when a wake-up call is building. This self-awareness and strength to stay in the present moment, see and accept a situation for what it is allows us to move forward differently—awake, centered, and prepared for the smallest experiences and the biggest changes in life.Wake Up Before Your Wake-Up Call expands on Parker’s work as a therapist and speaker and will help readers live more meaningful and engaged lives through deeper love, joy, and connection.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Toni Parker
• Release date: Sep 17, 2019
• ISBN: 9781989025864

Toni Parker

Toni Parker, PhD, is a certified mindfulness meditation teacher through Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach’s Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification Program, which is certified through the Awareness Training Institute and the Greater Good Science Center out of UC Berkeley. She is also a certified Gottman therapist and certified Mental Health Integrative Medicine provider. She holds a Plant-Based Nutrition Certificate from the T. Colin Campbell Center for Nutrition Studies and eCornell. As a Gottman therapist, Toni provides clinical trainings and teaches the Gottmans’ Art of Science and Love workshops in the US and abroad. She has studied various mind-body modalities, including at Harvard University and other institutions. Having been in private practice for more than twenty-five years, providing couples counseling, corporate trainings, and individual and group therapy, Toni has helped many discover their own potential and understand their emotional and compassionate selves and, ultimately, how to lead a more mindful and awakened life.

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Wake Up Before Your Wake-Up Call by Toni Parker

Praise for Wake Up Before Your Wake-Up Call

A must-read for building awareness of our body signals and making calm focus and compassion a part of our everyday lives.

John Gottman New York Times best-selling author of The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work

A powerful roadmap to navigating one’s inner world. With honesty, humor, and grace, Parker covers a wide range of practices designed to transform our lives. Her hard-won insights are an invitation to greater depth, love, and connection.

David Treleaven, PhD author of Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness: Practices for Safe and Transformative Healing

Deeply personal and eye-opening. Don’t wait for your own wake-up call to read this book.

Michael Fulwiler Chief Marketing Officer of the Gottman Institute

This insight-packed book lays out a helpful and practical journey of self-understanding. It is filled with exercises promoting mindful awareness and offers a variety of ways we can harmonize mental agitation and turmoil. Our mind can be our friend or our foe, and this book illuminates how to make our mind our best friend, forever. Highly recommended.

Will Tuttle, PhD author of the international best-seller The World Peace Diet and recipient of the Courage of Conscience Award and the Empty Cages Prize

"Dr. Toni Parker makes abundantly clear—waking up is not a one-time event. Wake Up Before Your Wake-Up Call is beautifully written with profound explorations of a trustworthy path to awakening. A gem, full of courage, meaning, and hope. Her timely and inspiring book is a well-paced interweaving of pith wisdom, an extensive inventory of wise and effective practices, compelling full-of real-life examples and stories, and some of the most practical, easy-to-implement exercises I’ve ever come across."

Linda Graham, MFT author of Resilience: Powerful Practices for Bouncing Back from Disappointment, Difficulty, and Even Disaster

This book offers both motivation and practices to shift your life from autopilot to an awakened resilience. Toni Parker weaves together her real-life experience with mindfulness skills and daily life actions to help you confront reality with awareness, equanimity, and generosity. Great range of practices; compassionate yet resolute tone.

Meg Salter author of Mind Your Life: How Mindfulness Can Build Resilience and Reveal Your Extraordinary

I see what people mean when they say this is a must-read book. Do you really want to change your life for the better? We all would answer yes to that, but more than likely have always thought... but how? Dr. Parker extends her welcoming hand with genuine warmth and compassion and guides you through simple but profound steps to become your own ‘inner activist’ and ‘best friend forever.’ Blending ancient wisdom with modern-day principles, this book will help you make the good, strong, mindful decisions to create a meaningful, purposeful life.

Lorin Lindner, PhD,MPH psychologist and author of Birds of a Feather: A True Story of Hope and the Healing Power of Animals

Wake Up Before Your Wake-Up Call by Toni ParkerWake Up Before Your Wake-Up Call by Toni Parker

Copyright © 2019 by Toni Parker

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For a copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

ISBN 978-1-989025-69-7 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-989025-86-4 (ebook)

Produced by Page Two

www.pagetwo.com

Cover design by Peter Cocking

Interior design by Taysia Louie

Ebook by Bright Wing Books (brightwing.ca)

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Names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.

This book is not intended as a substitute for the medical advice of physicians. The reader should regularly consult a physician in matters relating to his/her health and particularly with respect to any symptoms that may require diagnosis or medical attention.

Excerpt from Kindness from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems by Naomi Shihab Nye, copyright © 1995. Reprinted with the permission of Far Corner Books.

One Morning from Naked for Tea by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, copyright © 2018, Able Muse Press. Reprinted with permission.

The Guest House by Rumi, translation by Coleman Barks,copyright © 1997. Reprinted with permission.

Contents

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Pillar 1 - Body Sensation Awareness

1 - My Own Wake-Up Call

2 - Discover Your Feeling Tones

3 - Detect Feeling Patterns

4 - Ignite Your Inner Activist

Pillar 1 - Awakenings

Pillar 2 - Mind Kindness

5 - Find Freedom from Chatter, Ramblings, and Misery

6 - Establish the No Phone Zone

7 - Quell Mental Road Rage

8 - Create Mindful Surroundings

Pillar 2 - Awakenings

Pillar 3 - Mind Kindness

9 - Sail a Calm Sea

10 - Humor Me, Seriously

11 - Cultivate Forgive-a-bility

12 - Be Conscientious and Change

Pillar 3 - Awakenings

Pillar 4 - Self-Compassion

13 - Be Kind to You

14 - Define Fitting In

15 - De-friend

16 - Be Self-Aware, Not Self-Obsessed

Pillar 4 - Awakenings

Pillar 5 - Waking Up to the World

17 - Rise Up and Look Around

18 - Voluntarily Give

19 - Globally Relate

20 - Recognize Resilience

21 - Be With Mother Nature

22 - Your Bucket List and Deathbed Test

Pillar 5 - Awakenings

My Wish For You

Acknowledgments

In Memory of My Husband Steve

Bibliography

Further Reading

About My Work with the Gottman Institute

About the Author

In memory of my husband, Steve

Pillar 1

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Body

Sensation

Awareness

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1

My Own

Wake-Up Call

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I was too tired to be awake. It was early on a Thursday morning, and I had just returned from a professional meeting overseas. I was exhausted and unfocused. My husband, Steve, was still at home when the driver dropped me off. We sat and talked for a while, and then he went to shower. I remember noticing that my slender husband seemed to have lost a little weight, but my mind was foggy and it didn’t really register.

Steve came home that afternoon to check in on me, then returned to work. He was so devoted to his chiropractic patients and had appointments well into the evening.

The next day, I was still jet-lagged but able to make a dinner of salmon and salad. Steve, who usually ate such a healthy diet, just picked at his food. I noticed but didn’t say anything. Meanwhile, he could see my energy waning and urged me to go upstairs and sleep while he cleaned up the kitchen.

There was nothing too unusual about any of this—two professionals with lots of responsibility coming together at home to reunite, sometimes a little on the weary side.

Saturday morning was different. I woke up and went downstairs to my laptop, determined to catch up on e-mails. When Steve appeared, he was wearing his favorite navy-blue velour bathrobe. I was still feeling pretty wiped out, my mind and senses foggy, but when I saw him standing there in his robe, I had an unsettling feeling.

I don’t want to die, he blurted out.

What do you mean?

I’ve been having pain in my chest.

He told me it had started on Thursday, when he was working late. Although one of his patients, a physician and personal friend, had urged him to go to the ER just to rule out anything serious, he had ignored the advice. He had patients to see and didn’t want to disappoint them.

As he sat on the couch and put his head back, I could see how tired he looked, but it was still rather early in the morning, so I didn’t really think anything of it. He came and sat down next to me and insisted we talk about our finances and investment accounts.

Toni, I want to make sure you have the passwords to our—

Steve, I just can’t right now. I’m still so exhausted. Can’t it wait till tomorrow?

We need to do this, he said.

We briefly discussed passwords and other matters before he went upstairs to shower. When I went up a few minutes later to check on him, he seemed all right. But right after the shower he lay down again, saying he didn’t feel well. As I sat there with him, the phone rang. I walked into another room to answer. It was my son-in-law calling to see if we were available to meet for lunch. I told him about Steve not feeling well, and he suggested that I take him to the ER. When I hung up and walked back into the bedroom, I could hear Steve on the phone with Blue Cross. Apparently, he had not yet made our monthly health insurance payment and was calling to make sure we were covered.

That’s all I needed to hear. Get off the phone, I said. We’re going to the emergency room.

In the car, he said he wanted to cancel his Sunday patients and asked me to swing by his office. We were there for a half hour while he made his calls. He wasn’t in any pain, but finally I had had enough. Come on. We need to go.

The emergency room nurse told me that Steve would likely need a stent but probably not bypass surgery. He was conscious and could read the electrocardiogram data as they rolled him into surgery. Steve smiled at me and said, Everything will be fine. I felt relief.

My daughter had joined me in the hospital waiting room by the time the doctor returned with the news that the insertion of the stent had gone well. She continued that Steve would likely be ready to go home in twenty-four hours. You can go in to see him in about fifteen minutes, she added. And one more thing. When he gets home, he’ll need to go on a vegan diet.

My daughter protested. I don’t get it. He’s always eaten so healthily. He doesn’t eat meat. He eats primarily vegan, with the occasional piece of fish. The doctor didn’t know Steve and understandably assumed that he ate a standard American diet of meat, eggs, dairy, and so on, when that was far from the case. Steve and I were both very aware of the research done by Dr. Dean Ornish and others about the importance of a plant-based diet, especially in preventing and reversing heart disease.

I could feel that something wasn’t right, but I let it pass, not wanting to dwell on worst-case scenarios. I was sensitive to a gnawing feeling in my gut, but I didn’t want to even consider that something terrible might happen.

We sat there for a long time, waiting to be told we could visit Steve. Finally, the doctor returned—with a pained look on her face.

I don’t know how to say this, but your husband vomited and then aspirated. He almost died. We had to bring him back. He’s on life support now, and there’s a chance he won’t make it through the night.

I was too tired, or too much in shock, to absorb what she was saying. What do you mean he may not make it through the night? What happened? He was just fine.

Steve did make it through the night. Nine weeks later, he died of heart- and hospital-related complications.

The sudden loss of my husband was a devastating blow—and a profound wake-up call. To this day, I believe Steve’s death could have been avoided. If he had paid attention to the signals his body had apparently been giving him for months. If I hadn’t been so jet-lagged and had been more alert to his health crisis. If I had demanded we go straight to the ER and not detour to his office. If the doctors had properly done their job and paid more attention to his situation. If I had taken steps right away to get him medical help. If any of these things had happened, maybe he’d still be alive today.

And yet this totally human temptation to go over and over what is already done with traps us in the past, and that’s not what being awake is all about. The wake-up call is not about figuring out how we could have done this or that, but about the fact that we can do everything right and still not always control outcomes. That’s life. It is fragile and impermanent; if we want to live meaningfully and with joy, we have to accept that fact and be as present as we can be for ourselves and one another. To break a well-worn pattern, to wake up to the messages life is sending us and avoid crisis, we have to be tuned in to what’s happening right in front of us and not numb out. That said, sometimes just sitting with our stuck feelings is what we need to do—but to observe them without getting too entangled with them. We can also learn to bring compassion to ourselves when we realize we may be suffering with very difficult emotions. Through the course of the book, we’ll look at how to do all this.

Waking up takes practice. It involves the body, the mind, and the spirit. It involves paying attention to ourselves, attending to each other with care and focus, and reaching outside ourselves to connect with the wider world that needs our gifts and talents (and that shifts our attention from our own suffering).

So many of us feel as though we’re going through the motions in life. We feel stuck and unexcited or anxious and depressed. We’re cemented in routines. Some of us have become ill and only realized after the fact that our bodies had been giving us clues that something was wrong but we ignored the warnings. It’s easy to do that. Life puts so many demands on us that we can become masterful at pushing aside our own needs and rationalizing why we’re doing so. Or pushing off the calls of those around us. But who wants to sleepwalk through life like that?

Granted, the morning Steve was so insistent about our finances, I was depleted, physically and mentally. Even so, my body was giving me signals, and I knew it. That pinprick or nudge of minor annoyance was telling me to pay attention. Something was happening that was not right.

Sure, not every missed hunch or ignored intuitive nudge is fatal. We have hunches about people, politics, real estate, news, and sporting events all the time, and no real harm comes from overlooking them. And that’s part of why we tend to get lazy about answering the call. It’s hard to sort out the important messages from the everyday ones. Sometimes our hunches are off the mark. Waking up is not about acting every time a lightbulb turns on. It’s about developing our capacity for discernment. It’s about paying attention, respecting our thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations and the messages they are sending us.

Throughout this book, we’ll be looking at how to wake up without becoming overwhelmed with worry that we’re missing our call.

A Moment of Truth

One of my clients got a wake-up call quite different from mine.

It was only a dress that had slipped through her fingers and fallen to the floor of her closet. Or so Becky thought. As she kneeled to retrieve the garment, she felt her chest tighten. Soon she collapsed to her knees, sobbing. Crushing the soft fabric in both hands, she shook uncontrollably as an inner voice whispered, I don’t want to marry him.

Becky was engaged to be married and the wedding was not far off. The moment of truth had arrived. Something was amiss. Alone in a small space, she heard the message. But then what happened? Like so many of us, she ignored it.

I met Becky more than a year later, when the relationship was unraveling. She was distraught. She didn’t feel connected to her husband. They lived in the same home but seemingly on different planets. She was hungry for attention, connection, strong communication, intimacy, and the fulfillment of love. After talking about it with me for a while, she realized that she had had her wake-up call before the wedding and had pushed it away. Now that wake-up call was shaking her down.

Did her husband have his own moment of truth that he also ignored? Perhaps he too had an inkling that marrying Becky was not really what he wanted. But neither of them brought up their doubts, and so they just went ahead with a plan they both might have known was doomed from the start.

I’ve met with many men and women who know they are missing out on life and yet don’t know what to do about it. Why, as so many of us do, did Becky ignore the voice that spoke her truth? Why did I not take Steve’s distress signals—and my own hunch—more seriously?

Sometimes we ignore our wake-up calls because we’ve fallen into a comfort zone that lulls us to sleep. Or we don’t want to rock the boat or take actions that might fundamentally change our lives—even though they also might give us what we truly want. The trouble is, when we stick with the patterns that are familiar, we can’t move forward.

Sometimes we lack self-compassion and don’t respect the inner voices that speak to us, even gently, about our dissatisfaction. In my experience, the longer we wait to respect ourselves and act on what our gut knows to be true, the harder the fall.

Three years after her divorce, Becky still has not met anyone. She wants a relationship, but this time she wants to consciously choose how her relationship with the right man will work. She knows herself much better now and can move forward with awareness of what is important to her.

It sounds simple, but how do we actually go about finding what is important to us—our values, our needs? We begin by connecting with our bodies.

Tuning In to Our Bodies

Back when I was a student, an early influence was my teacher Robert Morris Sapolsky, now an award-winning Stanford University neuroendocrinologist and author. His field studies of primates revealed how stress caused by an overactive mind diminishes human life—because we are too smart for our own good.

Primates are super smart and organized just enough to devote their free time to being miserable to each other and stressing each other out, he said in a March 2007 article by Mark Shwartz, posted on the Stanford News website. But if you get chronically, psychosocially stressed, you’re going to compromise your health. So, essentially, we’ve evolved to be smart enough to make ourselves sick.

Our Western culture is very mind centered. We reward intellect and cleverness. We believe we can think our way through everything, including our emotional states. And we tend to ignore our bodies. On this point, the traditions of both Buddhist and Western psychology agree. Our physical self is like an electrical socket: to receive the benefit of that power, to become truly conscious, we must plug into and stay in touch with the body. I’m not talking about how we look to others—the outer package. I mean listening to our bodies as conduits of life energy.

We don’t have to wait to be blindsided by fate to discover this. We can all choose, right now, to get out of our me, me, me head trips and become grounded in the body. Let’s try an exercise to support this grounding.

Paying Attention to the Body

Right now, where are your hands? Are they holding a cup of coffee or steering your car (if you’re listening on audiobook!) or caressing a child? What is the physical sensation you experience when doing any of those things? Try to pay attention.

What is happening inside your body right now? Where in your body do you find it easier to access sensation and feel aliveness? Or where is it more difficult? Can you