Wellness training

I attended a brown bag lunch thingy about stress management and personal wellness at work today. My hope was that there would be something in the program about how to cope with the annoyances that come from working in cubicles, but that sort of useful material was studiously avoided. Instead, there was a lot of perfectly good information about how to manage deadlines, how to let it go when someone is too preoccupied to say "good morning", etc.

Pointers that would be useful in a work environment that's not as dysfunctional and organizationally abstract as ours is.

As a parting gift, the speaker turned on a white noise machine that made sounds like ocean surf and sea birds. She told us to close our eyes and then led us through a visualization exercise in which we were walking down the beach in our bare feet, alone, completely at peace.

So there I was, walking down the beach, watching the waves—and I stepped on a stranded jellyfish. I muttered a curse, hopping around while rubbing my foot and trying to remember if dead washed-up jellyfish can sting, before losing my balance and falling face first in the sand.

"Now sit down in the sand. Wiggle your toes..."

Spitting salty grit, I sat up and started rooting my feet around in the sand. I promptly cut the ball of my foot on a half-buried Pringles top.

"...and look out across the water to the horizon. You see a warm glimmer of light, and as you watch it comes closer, closer... but you're not afraid."

What the...

"The glowing orb approaches you, and as it hovers over your ankles, you feel warmth."

Probably the blood spurting from my foot.

"Slowly, the orb makes its way up your legs toward—"

Whoa. Hold up, there. This was starting to sound just a little too much like some weird-ass Philip José Farmer novel.

That's when my visualization took a detour. I walked off the beach to my car, unloaded my bike, and rode away—leaving my stress, a dead jellyfish, and a bloody Pringles top behind.