Anthony Rella, MA, LMHC

Author: Anthony Rella

  • 4 Principles – Desiring and Fearing Presence

    3. We desire and fear presence.

    I define presence as the experience of being in full awareness and acceptance of one’s immediate physical, emotional, spiritual, relational, and cognitive experience. In action, presence is simple. It is experiencing the present moment as it is. Engaged in life as it is unfolding. Connected to the environment and beings we are in relationship with and connected to the inner experience. This is in an aspirational capacity that most people do not have without effort and practice, but I think it is what we long for and forget we long for.

    Experiences of grief and loss awaken us to this longing most acutely. When something or someone important to us is lost, we face the reality of death and the realization that we have not been wholly alive. We think of how much we missed out on, how we failed to savor the moments we had, how taking for granted the existence of these important people and experiences also meant allowing us not to be fully engaged.

    This is one facet of the human condition. I might spend hours planning and preparing the perfect meal for the perfect dinner party, only to spend most of the evening caught up in my anxious thoughts and worries about whether the party is going well, whether the food is really okay or if people are pretending, whether people are having a good time. At the end of the night, I might realize that I did not actually attend my party. I forgot to savor it, and now it’s over.

    Mental, emotional, and behavioral problems intensify this struggle. People stuck in a deep depression are both disconnected from the moment because of their depression, and also struggle to find the motivation to become present, because being present means feeling exactly how poorly they feel. Anxiety pulls us out of the moment. Addictive behavior is in part a turning away from presence, chasing an experience that is only fleetingly glimpsed through substance or behavioral abuse and avoiding the raw immediacy of being.

    Full presence also comes with a feeling of intimacy and vulnerability that might be painful for those unused to it. This reminds me of the moment in the Adam and Eve story in which they gain the knowledge of good and evil, and God wants to speak with them, but they feel ashamed because they are naked. One might read that as the dawning of conscious awareness, realizing that one is a human being among other conscious beings, seen exactly for who you are, unguarded, unprotected. Most of us want to run away from that. Most of us don’t want to see ourselves exactly as we are. And yet I believe we also have a deep longing for this, this experience that we try to describe through phrases like “being seen” or “being heard.” Both point to this experience of authentic, vulnerable connection in presence, witnessing and being witnessed. This state is in itself healing. Those parts of us that are fearful of rejection, criticism, and shame flourish when they are finally recognized within a state of full presence and acceptance.

    Accessing states of presence happens to all of us in moments, but we need practice and diligence to really cultivate and expand them. Many religions offer such practices, whether that is the stated intention or not, to help people become more connected to the here-and-now and less imprisoned by habits of thought, feeling, and action. Psychotherapy offers its own tools and practices, in part by helping to name and dissolve the blocks in our personality that make presence so painful and challenging. Presence is also a modality of healing. Therapists offer this witnessing and presence to the client, who ideally begin to internalize this and develop their own capacities for self-witnessing and becoming present.

  • 4 Principles – As Within, So Without

    2. As within, so without.

    This is a tricky one and requires context and balance. It begins with the assumption that we exist with an inner world of feelings, thoughts, fantasies, drives, desires, aversions, and all those complexities–and we exist in an outer world of people, circumstances, actions, and consequences. The principle further assumes that there is a more-than-incidental relationship between the inner and outer worlds, that they reflect and create each other in ways that are difficult to comprehend rationally.

    Already we are nearing dangerous territory, opening up the possibility for that spiritually abusive maxim that a person is somehow responsible for their miseries, failures, or traumas–that these happened because the person was sinful, or did not have enough faith, or unconsciously invited them to happen. This perspective is quite damaging for someone in the depths of shame or depression. This is why I underline that the inner and outer worlds coexist and influence each other but they are separate. Even with the premise that one person’s thoughts or inner world can cause things to happen in the outer world, we must think about how that is true for every single person, which means the outer world is constantly manifesting in response to thousands of wishes, hopes, fears, and inner conflicts.

    All of that said, when sitting in the therapy room with one’s therapist, we are not in a place to heal the social, economic, cultural, and historical forces that contribute to one’s suffering. What we have are the people in the room and the inner psychic images of the world we carry with us. Often what we see within are mirrors of what is happening without. The anger I feel at a person who constantly criticizes me may arise because I find my inner criticism so painful. When I feel no one listens to me, I might not be listening to myself and speaking in a way to be heard. Or the trauma my ancestors experience might be literally living in me.

    As Above So Below, by KyoukiGirl

    When we’re feeling trapped in life or stuck in relationship patterns we hate, typically this comes with some stuckness, some limitation or attachment that keeps us from seeing all the available options. In therapy, we tend to recreate these dynamics between therapist and client. If a client feels powerless and unable to change their lives, they might look to the therapist for salvation but refuse or shoot down every suggestion the therapist makes. This creates the opportunity to look beyond the content and at the process being enacted. With some reflection, the client might discover that within them this same dynamic plays out–a part of them feels powerless and defeated, and another part of them makes suggestions that are dismissed or diminished. Sometimes even a thought that causes them to feel empowered is met with intense anxiety that feels intolerable, so the dismissal of the thought returns the person to a state of calm, though deeply unsatisfied, existence.

    Looking at this reflection of inner and outer, and learning to differentiate between what is within and what is without, helps us to make deeper changes. Instead of blaming ourselves or someone else for our problems, we can look at the relationships between behaviors and begin to make shifts. If we can learn to accept the inner critic and use its advice skillfully, then we might become less defensive when a partner offers criticism, acknowledging what is useful and discarding what is not. If we can accept the presence of anxiety within us, we can respond to anxiety-provoking situations with greater calm and clearsightedness. Changing our behavior then begins to ripple out in changing systems around us.

    Sometimes we need to make outer changes to promote inner wellbeing. We might step away from relationships, attachments, and obligations that feel harmful or draining. Healing the personal consequences of oppression only goes so far if the external systems of oppression continue unabated. People who do not have a strongly internalized sense of structure and boundedness tend to have it imposed upon them by systems of policing and imprisonment or mental health containment. When those who struggle with addiction, mental illness, and homelessness are provided the external supports they need, such as housing and a basic income, that outer stability supports them in gaining inner stability, leading to vastly improved recovery outcomes.

    In my personal work, I have discovered profound and bizarre changes occur when I work earnestly on myself. I once worked through some unresolved grief and pain I had with a person I had known for years but hadn’t been in contact with, only to have her call me within the next day. I once sat in my therapist’s office, working on a dream about cats that I found upsetting due to some of the content. His office had a glass door to a garden, and as I described one of the cats, a living stray cat meeting my dream cat’s description came to the door and looked in on us. These “meaningful coincidences” are what is known as synchronicity, in which the inner and outer worlds seem to be communicating with each other in profound and unexpected ways. Self-work is not the solution to all ills, but it is powerful.

  • 4 Principles – Purposeful and Paradoxical

    For the next four blog posts, I will look at four key principles that inform how I approach psychotherapy. These come from practical experience and study of several theoretical approaches. They are not the right or only principles, simply formulations that work for me. I write these here for current or future clients who might want to understand why I do what I do in session. Some therapists are great about explaining to their clients therapeutic principles and providing a very clear context about their interventions in session. This is not my style, and at times I wonder if this is confusing for the client.

    1. Human behavior is purposeful, and its purpose is often paradoxical.

    People rarely start therapy when their lives are working well and they feel wholly authentic. Typically people come in when lost or overwhelmed, when life doesn’t seem to work, or someone else has pushed. There is often a disconnect between thoughts, feelings, actions, impact on others, and what is believed about one’s self. The person entering therapy might not understand why they’re feeling, thinking, or doing the things they are.

    When I am sitting with a person telling their story, I sit with the view that very little if any of their behavior or “symptoms” are random or purposeless. Many of our behaviors are solutions to problems we’ve encountered in life, either discovered or learned from family that became rigid. When people are stuck, typically we are entangled with our solutions and have lost touch with the creativity that produced the solution in the first place. Then we are consistently applying the solution in ways that no longer work well, or cause us and others harm.

    If someone comes in with a “drinking problem,” one of the questions that is always an open question is: what does this drinking problem solve? If this client managed to control her drinking, what would she need to confront next? One theory of posttraumatic stress disorder, for example, is that the traumatic incident causes a psychic wound and the one who suffers experiences this as a part of self that feels like the trauma is happening in real time when reminded of it. The person with PTSD often finds themselves caught in a bizarre bind of constantly trying to avoid reminders of the trauma while another part of themselves constantly tries to re-experience it. With enough severity, the sufferer may turn to addictions as a way to numb the stress of PTSD.

    In this example, one solution is the addictive behavior–drinking to oblivion solves the problem of re-experiencing, though it also creates many new problems. The other solution is the re-experiencing itself, which some researcher think is the psyche’s instinctive way of healing itself from trauma. The theory is that those with PTSD engage in avoidance strategies that keep the trauma from being integrated–the natural solution is experienced as itself a problem.

    by LuciaSofo

    The paradoxical part is that much rigid behavior also has an inner incongruence. The person who can’t stop talking and dominates the conversation may have an inner, unconscious or semi-conscious, feeling that he is not being heard–but the people around him don’t realize this, because they are experiencing that feeling themselves and see him as the person who does not listen. This assumption provides an interesting field of inquiry because it does not seem to make sense initially. With exploration, we might find that in fact he is not being heard because he is not saying anything that truly matters to him. His excessive talking is a way of distancing himself from the connection he craves, pointing in every direction except the one that matters most.

    When a part of us is stuck, we are very skilled at re-creating the circumstances in which we feel stuck. Perhaps we do this because we hope one of these days we’ll finally be proven right. Perhaps we do this because the familiar feels safe, even when it’s miserable. Perhaps it’s because the story we tell about ourselves is hiding some deeper truths that we’re avoiding. One of the gifts of this principle is that even avoidant behavior contains clues that point to these deeper truths. If someone appears to be pushing too hard in one direction, I become curious about what lies behind them.

  • forgetting a home you’ve never known

    The Spirit of Phinney Ridge

    Children
    you are alien
    upon me,
    travelers pausing,
    eating the flesh
    of other lands,
    drinking the water
    of other streams,
    wearing the skin
    of other herds,
    ignorant
    of the names
    of my beasts
    and leaves.
    You circle
    without end
    forgetting
    a home
    you’ve never
    known.
    What you imagine
    among the stars
    dwells within
    this space.
    Align to me,
    orient
    to the shadows
    cast upon me.
    Dissolve
    your fences.
    Root down
    in my soil,
    my sorrow,
    my dark soul.
    Feed from me,
    sleep in me,
    love on me,
    surrender
    your dead
    to me.
    Nourish me
    with tears
    and blood,
    lay words
    like stones
    upon my back.
    Be chilled
    by my grief,
    warmed
    by my laughter.
    There is no I
    apart
    from you.
    Join your eye
    to mine.

    – A. Rella

  • There is No Right Type of Relationship

    One topic that I see batted back and forth often, particularly in gay male communities, is around the value of monogamy in long-term relationships. I’ve recently come across a few articles acknowledging that a sizable proportion of long-term gay male couples do not practice sexual monogamy in their relationships but arguing that secretly all gay men really want monogamy and are unable to sustain it, or alternately arguing that somehow because many gay men now have access to legal same-sex marriage they are obligated to practice sexual monogamy.

    Gay men are not the only population in which people practice non-monogamous models of relationship. Non-monogamy includes a range of relationship models, including people who are emotionally in a closed relationship but able to have sexual experiences outside the relationship; people who have two or more committed sexual and romantic partners; and far more than I care to spell out here. (Inevitably I will leave models out or unfairly lump a few models together.) Dan Savage coined the term “monogamish” for couples that largely practice monogamy with very occasional sexual experiences outside the primary pair.

    Some folks who highly value monogamy tend to insult or pathologize non-monogamous relationships. Arguments include that non-monogamy exposes the people involved to higher risks of sexually transmitted infections and romantic infidelities, or are inherently unstable. Some folks who highly value non-monogamy tend to insult or pathologize monogamous relationships, saying that those within the relationships are somehow stuck in a rigid moral code that is unhealthy and retrograde, or only do so out of fear and blind adherence to religious and social codes.

    I do not think there is a “correct” model of relationship, and I do not think anyone should be pressured into a kind of relationship that goes against their values and needs. I think every long-term human relationship requires commitment, respect, friendship, intimacy, communication, and the ability to manage conflict. If a person feels isolated and neglected because their partner is out every night and does not come home to spend time with them, that is a problem in the relationship, not an indictment of whatever relationship model they’re working.

    Entering into a nominally monogamous relationship does not guarantee that both parties involved will never have any risk of contracting a sexually transmitted infection; never have any risk of one partner leaving them for another person; never have any risk of feeling jealous, left out, resentful, or hurt. All of these things can and do happen to people who thought they were in monogamous relationships. Monogamy is a practice, and for many people this practice is deeply fulfilling and in line with their values and desires.

    Entering into an open relationship or polyamorous relationship does not mean that those involved are somehow more evolved or freer, that they will have relationships free of jealousy, boredom, loneliness, or possessiveness. Every person comes into a relationship with a unique map of attachment and wounding, and every person has a limitation or vulnerability that needs respect when establishing healthy boundaries. “Open” does not mean “without rules,” it means that the rules are determined by all parties involved and require as much accountability and mutual respect as monogamy does.

    Infidelity and betrayal happen in every type of relationship. Every rule can be broken in a way that is deeply hurtful. People could be belittled or ignored in any style of relationship, but so too can they share intimacy, respect, friendship, and mutual support. Relationships take the form of the people involved. We are complex human beings with complicated and contradictory needs, and relationships seem almost designed to stir up our vulnerabilities and fears even as we look to them to fulfill our needs. Every partner’s needs, desires, and frailties should have space for expression and respect within the relationship. These things also change with time, and so too must relationships.

  • A Practice with Love at the Center, Part 2

    Love is a combination of six ingredients: care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect and trust. – bell hooks

    As I practice compassion and coach others in empathetic listening, one mantra I keep returning to is, “You don’t have to agree with a person’s experience of the world to have empathy for it.” The Gottmans have an excellent suggestion for a simple practice of empathy, simply to try to understand the person’s experience and then say something like, “I can understand why you’d feel that way.” This understanding gives nothing away, it does not yield one’s own truth and perspective, but it is a balm for the person benefiting from the understanding.

    In my experience, people caught up in an emotional response have difficulty receiving and processing feedback when they don’t feel understood. Someone who’s feeling particularly angry, sad, depressed, or even happy become more hardened and defensive against someone who seems to be attacking their emotional experience by disagreeing with or criticizing it. Imagine a good friend who is in a relationship you think is horrible but they seem blissed out. How well do they hear your concerns? But approaching someone first with understanding helps them to soften that emotion and then hear what you have to say. Often I find that when I offer that empathy and understanding, the person then feels safe enough to share the concerns they have about the situation, which would be all the concerns I would have said.

    What does this have to do with loving practice? I think it defuses an unspoken fear that people have about love, that if we act with care and respect toward a person who is doing something harmful then we become naïve and susceptible to harm. This is also where the confluence of all six of bell hooks’s ingredients is invaluable. I can offer caring and respect to a person but also maintain an attitude of responsibility and knowledge. “I can appreciate why you feel that way, and what you are doing is causing harm.”

    hooks’s ingredients of love suggest a process that refines and heals, and not an outcome or prescribed set of acts. I might look at a story of brokenness or self-hatred and rethink what it would mean to approach that facet of life with love. Body-hatred comes to mind. There are ample discussions of how media and culture creates body hatred, particularly for people of color, queer people, and female-bodied people, so I’m not going to get into that. Instead I want to look at how it could be if instead of trying to “fix” my body I could act with love toward it.

    Care – Can I start from the perspective that my body is worthy of care and wellness? That it is a precious resource and deserves to be treated so?

    Knowledge – What actions support and strengthen my body? Where does my body need comfort or rest? What food and exercise helps my body to feel its best? What food or activities seem to harm or deplete my body?

    Commitment – What steps will I take to give my body the support and rest it needs? What will I do regardless of how I feel on a given day? What promise can I keep to my body?

    Responsibility – How can I claim more responsibility for my body? Can I call into myself the authority to decide what is best for my body? Can I set aside all the media and cultural images of what my body is “supposed to” look like and see my body for what it is, what shape it wants to take? Can I take responsibility for my choices, whether they harm or help my body? What resources do I need, and can I ask for them?

    Respect – Are my choices aligned with what I know and understand about my body? Am I pushing myself too hard? Am I letting myself off the hook too often? Am I making the best choices I can for my body, given my life and circumstances as they are today?

    Trust – Do I trust myself to act in integrity? Am I showing up consistently to my commitments? Are there particular commitments that I regularly find hard to keep? If so, could I scale back the commitment to one that is more realistic and more likely for me to keep? Trust is something that is built with consistent action, and succeeding at doing something small every day is better for trust than regularly failing at a large goal. With a foundation of self-trust, you can increase your commitments with time until you meet that big goal.

    One lesson that comes from acting with love is learning to see an innate worth to nearly everything and everyone. This, again, does not mean that we have to accept every action with naïve acceptance. What it does mean is that we get to listen to the parts of ourselves that feel angry, that feel joyful, that believe something about the world, that know something different about the world, and from this inner democracy make a loving choice. It means we don’t have to, for example, swallow  anger when we feel hurt and spiral into a story of “if I wasn’t so weak then I wouldn’t feel hurt,” but we can care about ourselves enough to tell the person how their actions affected us.

  • A Practice with Love at the Center

    What would life look like if efforts to grow and develop began from an attitude of love? For this conversation, I do not mean “love” as a feeling or impulse, but “love” like M. Scott Peck’s definition as “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” Another great definition comes from bell hooks in this interview: “Love is a combination of six ingredients: care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect and trust.” This is about love as an attitude and approach, as a source of committed action.

    Recently I’ve stepped back to look at my own relentless quest for self-improvement, and listening to others share their stories of efforts to improve, develop, and grow. One theme I’ve noticed in my experience is an attitude of “self-improvement” coming from the basic assumption that one is flawed, unworthy, defective, or in some way bad. From this perspective, one might look at a goal of becoming physically fit and healthy and frame it as, “I hate my body.” Other spurs for change include statements like “I hate my job.”

    I almost wrote that hatred doesn’t necessarily motivate action, but then I rethought things. I think hatred does motivate action, but the motivated action is not necessarily one that promotes health, wellness, or joy. Hatred is about aversion and repulsion. Hatred doesn’t focus on what is desired, only what is despised. It’s a feckless creature. Some days, my body hatred might spurs me to eat three donuts and confirm the reasons why I hate my self or body. (“Now I feel gross. I’ll never be healthy.”) Other days, it spurs me to go work out, but exercise motivated by self-hatred is dangerous. It’s the kind of exercise that doesn’t listen to the body’s needs and limitations, or acknowledge that bodies have different shapes and respond to exercise differently. It’s the kind of exercise that pushes past the body’s warning signals and causes its own damage.

    I think a lot of people grow up internalizing some view of self as being bad, defective, broken, or unworthy in some way. Advertising capitalizes on these messages to sell us things to fix our myriad problems, even problems that the campaigns create for us so that we’ll want the solutions. The core message is that something’s wrong with you, and you need something external to fix it, except the fix is not permanent and doesn’t make you any different. I see this toxic thread throughout culture. “I feel unlovable, but if that person loves me then I’ll know I’m lovable, but they’ll never love me because I’m unlovable.” (“And even if they do love me, it’s somehow a mistake or I’ve tricked them and one day they’ll know I’m unlovable.”) When we buy into these stories–that I’m broken, unworthy, damaged, or hateful–then our attempts to “improve” may well push those stories deeper.

    Light sculpture, Nils Rigbers, Luminale 2012

    The ways we regulate our systems looks different when coming from a place of control or condemnation. As a society, the United States is being forced to reckon with the consequences of its system of policing and imprisonment, which focuses on controlling and punishing criminals. With this attitude, it makes sense to allow officers largely unregulated authority to use force to subdue and incarcerate people. The result is that the police are allowed to become increasingly militarized and free of accountability for their decisions. I am not personally in favor of this approach, but I can see why police officers might feel angry about the backlash against them for doing their jobs in this way.

    Contrast this with a social worker, whose job it is to promote a desired society and might look at the same person, the “criminal,” through a different lens. Instead of seeing a need to control, the social worker might see a person trying to cope with a lack of skills and resources that afford basic dignity and health. There is evidence that punitive measures against social problems like drug addiction are not as effective as approaches that connect the person to social supports and stability. Instead of control, the social worker responds with loving action–the attempt to foster change and improve lives.

     

     

    All this said, I’m pondering what my life and culture could look like if love was at the center of our practices. As this entry has already gone on long enough, I may return to this later.

  • Media Racism, Cultural Shadows, and Anger: Black Lives Still Matter

    This is a week in which it feels hard to think of something positive and uplifting to write. Since I often aim to write with an eye toward illuminating some facet of psychology, even when talking about culture, I’m thinking about how our media representation of stories involving people of color (particularly Black Americans in this post) reveals so much about our own cultural shadows.

    Last year in Ferguson and this year in Baltimore, the media and many social media conversations focused on the acts of rioting and violence committed by a fraction of the total people who were out in the communities protesting police violence. Now this fear of uprising has led to martial law and the eradication of civil liberties in Baltimore. As with Ferguson, one of the most noticeable reactions by Whites has been to fixate and condemn the rioting, either through the straight-up racist language of calling Black people “thugs” and “animals” or through the kinder racism of concern that they should be nonviolently resisting, because “violence never solves anything.” Those White people condemning violence are hopefully giving the same amount if not more energy toward condemning the police and government for employing violence against its citizens. Instead, the victims are expected to be somehow more than human, able to tolerate abuse and oppression and rise to nonviolent resistance. And even when the majority of people are resisting nonviolently, somehow these people get blamed for the minority that acts out violently.

    As I was thinking about this tendency to fixate on the violence and downplay or ignore the people who did actually practice nonviolent protest, I remembered the news coverage of Hurricane Katrina. Remember all the stories that made it sound like the place had fallen into an apocalyptic world in which random violence broke out everywhere and people were turning on each other, even shooting rescue helicopters? Did you know those were mostly wrong, or grossly exaggerated?

    There is a deep shadow of the collective unconsciousness of the United States, which we project onto those who are socially and politically vulnerable in our society. Popular mythology (the media and politics) ascribes to poor people of color all these qualities of lawlessness and inhumanity and deny their humanity, then we in the dominant culture support systems and organizations that penalize and control these people with violence and economic degradation. So the dominant culture accuses welfare recipients of being lazy drug addicts and create policies that are huge wastes of money, testing welfare recipients only to learn that a fraction of recipients actually tested positive for anything. The dominant culture thinks that the anger and grief in the wake of a senseless murder somehow justifies the system that perpetuated the murder.

    Those of us who benefit from the status quo and participate in this projection do not see our own monstrous faces looming over the crowds, laughing at the misery of the poor and people of color, saying they deserve it while the policies we support place burden after burden upon them.

    I’m not saying everyone on one side is evil and guilty and everyone on the other side is blameless. That’s exactly the opposite of what I mean. Some people commit acts of evil, acts that harm and degrade others, make their lives smaller and meaner and emptier of hope. Sometimes, the evil comes from the acts or inaction of many, a broader system that depersonalizes evil by making it routine and without accountability. The individual cop who kills unarmed citizens is only an extension of a deeper history, a larger shadow, a system that endorses the betrayal of the basic values of life and liberty.

    I’ve nothing profound to say but I fear by saying nothing that I am endorsing mass incarceration, martial law, and police brutality. I’d rather listen to the people who are working to make change, who are putting themselves on the line or directly living this unrest and oppression.

    Links:

    In Baltimore, We’re All Freddie Gray

    Nonviolence as Compliance in Baltimore

    Gang Members: We Did Not Make Truce to Harm Cops

    Planned purge and thugs: US media criticized for Baltimore coverage

    Sun Investigates: Undue Force

    Quotes:

    “Urban riots must now be recognized as durable social phenomena. They may be deplored, but they are there and should be understood. Urban riots are a special form of violence. They are not insurrections. The rioters are not seeking to seize territory or to attain control of institutions. They are mainly intended to shock the white community. They are a distorted form of social protest. The looting which is their principal feature serves many functions. It enables the most enraged and deprived Negro to take hold of consumer goods with the ease the white man does by using his purse. Often the Negro does not even want what he takes; he wants the experience of taking. But most of all, alienated from society and knowing that this society cherishes property above people, he is shocking it by abusing property rights. There are thus elements of emotional catharsis in the violent act. This may explain why most cities in which riots have occurred have not had a repetition, even though the causative conditions remain. It is also noteworthy that the amount of physical harm done to white people other than police is infinitesimal and in Detroit whites and Negroes looted in unity.

    A profound judgment of today’s riots was expressed by Victor Hugo a century ago. He said, ‘If a soul is left in the darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness.’

    The policymakers of the white society have caused the darkness; they create discrimination; they structured slums; and they perpetuate unemployment, ignorance and poverty. It is incontestable and deplorable that Negroes have committed crimes; but they are derivative crimes. They are born of the greater crimes of the white society. When we ask Negroes to abide by the law, let us also demand that the white man abide by law in the ghettos. Day-in and day-out he violates welfare laws to deprive the poor of their meager allotments; he flagrantly violates building codes and regulations; his police make a mockery of law; and he violates laws on equal employment and education and the provisions for civic services. The slums are the handiwork of a vicious system of the white society; Negroes live in them but do not make them any more than a prisoner makes a prison. Let us say boldly that if the violations of law by the white man in the slums over the years were calculated and compared with the law-breaking of a few days of riots, the hardened criminal would be the white man. These are often difficult things to say but I have come to see more and more that it is necessary to utter the truth in order to deal with the great problems that we face in our society.”

    – Martin Luther King, Jr. 1967
    APA’s Annual Convention in Washington, D.C.

    “If you are neutral in situations of injustice you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”

  • Don’t Try to Be Calm

    Relaxation, peace, and calmness are not goals of mindfulness and meditation practices. They are often common and welcome side-effects, but in a sense they cannot be the desired outcome of practice. The wisdom of this is often hard to grasp from a Western perspective, where relief of pain is an ideal goal of medical treatment. More deeply, contemporary Western culture seems to view a crisis as something to be resolved with urgency and without regard to how the solution might perpetuate a later crisis. When one vein of oil dries up, we dig for another. The suggestion that we slow down, sink into the crisis, and let it transform our way of life so that it is not longer a crisis is antithetical to how we do life.

    Often, when I lead someone in meditation or mindfulness practice for their first time, they will report a feeling of calm and serenity. This was my early experience as well. I remember that I had meditated daily for about three months when, one morning, I suddenly realized that the muscles in my legs were tense. I realized, furthermore, that they were often tense. I realized, further-furthermore, that I could simply allow them to relax and there was no more tension. I had no idea of any of this because I’d spent very little of my life being present to my body. I spent much more time avoiding my body and all its “undesirable” sensations.

    Troubled Water, Denis Helfer

    My theory, which is not so much “mine” as it is one I’ve discerned from encountering Buddhist thought, Western Esoteric thought, and a lot of psychology books, is that one underlying source of tension arises from all the ways we humans avoid the experiences we label as bad or undesirable. It is like when one has a broken toe and learns how to limp to reduce the intensity of pain in the toe. With time, that person might begin to notice pain and tension in their upper back, their neck, their other leg. The body has an optimal way to move, and any variations on that movement has a longer-term cost.

    So too, I think, with the mind. If I’m trying not to feel sad, not to feel vulnerable, not to feel angry, not to feel hopeful, not to look bad in front of others, not to feel too anxious, not to feel lonely, not to feel hopeless, not to feel ugly, not to feel desired, not to feel criticized, not to stand out too much, not to feel scared… There is a wide array of undesirable experiences and one person’s heaven is another’s hell. But if we are whole people, then there will be moments when we’ll have these feelings and more. And when someone says, “I don’t want to feel this way,” I often hear, “Part of me feels this way and another part of me is trying to push it down.” This inner conflict creates tension and dis-ease.

    Meditation is the antidote to this, as it cultivates unconditional acceptance. Often there is an object or focus of meditation, but quickly we learn how much the wind wanders from the object of attention. The practice is to learn to notice when the attention has shifted and gently bring it back to the object of focus. Simple but not easy. When we sit in stillness, often we encounter everything unresolved in our hearts and minds, all of our habits of being, all of our tensions, essentially everything that we want to avoid noticing. The more that we can accept these as simply being there and gently return to the present moment through bringing attention to the object of focus.

    Often, after doing this for the first time, many people report feelings of relaxation or tiredness. I think that comes from the ease of being present and not constantly striving to avoid one thing or pull toward another. Discomfort is simply discomfort and not something to rail and struggle against. Hence the benefits of ease. The problem comes when someone go back to meditation hoping to get back to that relaxation. Now they’re stuck avoiding some feelings and trying to grab others. They want a specific outcome and push away all the experiences that aren’t that outcome. Even this is great information, illuminating yet another habit of thought and being that one can approach with acceptance.

    That is what is meant when someone refers to happiness as a trap. If all we’re concerned with is preserving things as they are and dismissing anything that doesn’t fit the experience we want to have, we’re stuck. If we only choose to listen to some opinions, look at some information, acknowledge some problems and condemn the rest, we’re stuck. Acknowledging more of the wholeness of experience gives our knowledge, wisdom, and ideas more depth and integrity.

  • Understanding Your Blocks

    There is a meditation I use when I want to explore places that are blocked or stuck on deeper levels. I think of feeling stuck or blocked as occurring inevitably, sometimes signifying places where who we are and what we’re doing with life are not in alignment. When feeling blocked, it’s easy to focus on the frustrating and defeating sense of being blocked and not the awareness of the parts of us in flow. If energy wasn’t moving, then it couldn’t be blocked. It would simply be still and contained.

    I’m not, at this point in my career, a person who promises tools to help you get unstuck. There are great teachers out there who do that work. What I’ve found is that when I feel stuck the best way to get unstuck is to start doing the thing I feel stuck with. Yesterday I felt blocked about blogging and started to write a blog post about quitting blogging because I no longer knew what to write about, and as I wrote that entry, something in me shifted and I decided to write this instead.

    Not everyone seems to respond to this approach, and I’ve experienced blocks that are very deep and ingrained. My approach to these–when I’m not myself feeling frustrated or beating myself up for being stuck–is to wonder whether this block is here for a reason. Is there some deeper purpose to being blocked? Is there something about the way I’m approaching this situation that defeats my intention? Is there something about this situation that is blocking me? Is this block a way of protecting myself from making a choice that could harm me, whether due to bad timing or a bad reading of the situation? Is this stuckness simply sloth, or coming from a fear of change?

    Here is a contemplative practice that I use to get more information about blockages or places of stuckness. It is a variation on a meditation called the “Thousand Petal Lotus.”

    Get into a comfortable posture with your legs crossed or your feet resting on the floor. With every inhalation, breathe in more slowly, more deeply. With every exhalation, breathe out more slowly and completely.

    Consider a word or image associated with a place in you that feels stuck or blocked. Hold that word or image in the center of your mind. Notice what thoughts or memories arise. When you notice a thought or memory, acknowledge its presence, acknowledge its connection to the core word or image, then return to the core word or image. Continue this process of noticing and returning for several breaths.

    Imagine that this word or image can sink from your mind, down your throat, coming to rest in your heart. Notice what feelings or emotions are present. When you notice a feeling, acknowledge its presence and connection to the core word or image, then return to the core word or image. Notice even if no feelings seem to come up, or places of numbness. Continue this process of noticing and returning for several breaths.

    Lotus flower in Korea, by sarang 사랑

    Imagine that this word or image can sink from your heart, down your solar plexus, coming to rest in your belly. Notice what physical sensations are present. When you notice a sensation, acknowledge its presence and connection to the core word or image, then return to the core word or image. Continue this process of noticing and returning for several breaths. Notice places of tension or ease, places of discomfort or places of numbness.

    Let the core word or image stay in your center, but allow your field of awareness to soften and expand. Let yourself notice sensations, feelings, and thoughts, imagining that each of these connects back to the core word or image. Let these connections be like a spider’s web, connected to each other and back to the dense central core image or word. If you find yourself trying to analyze or make sense of your experience, breathe in and allow your awareness to soften, simply noticing what is present. Allow understanding to arise from this awareness, and not imposing meaning upon it.

    Whether understanding comes or not, thank yourself for being present and engaging in this work. Acknowledge the work you have done and let the central word or image go. Bring your awareness back to your surroundings. Touch the edges of your body. Journal whatever information came up.