Anthony Rella, MA, LMHC

Author: Anthony Rella

  • 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.

     

  • Publication Announcement: The Star of Opening

    71sZABbSL9LI’m proud to announce that The Star of Opening, an anthology of spiritual writings from Morningstar Mystery School, is now available on Amazon.com. I co-edited this anthology, and one of my essays, “The Stillness About Which the World Spins,” is included as well. (Fancy that!)

    The material ranges from esoteric to deeply personal, showing the breadth and depth of how each contributors’ spiritual work moves through their lives. Topics include establishing a daily practice, ethics and values, death, stillness, astral visions, and presence. I am excited that we have created this document of thought and work from our early years of development as a school.

    Please get yourself a copy!

  • Ode to Listening

    I love listening, and I am still learning how to do it. Listening is the core of my practice and the seed of my growth. Listening is the wellspring from which so many rich insights and contributions flow. Listening invites a softness of awareness and self. To listen, I first acknowledge that there is a reality that I perceive through my senses that exists outside of me, and to understand and connect with this reality I need to allow space around my opinions and beliefs for new information.

    When I think of listening, I think more broadly than simply receiving auditory data. The inner mechanisms by which I make sense of the data is also part of listening. The physical presence of the person speaking is a facet of this listening, what their bodies are doing or not doing. Watching their gestures and nonverbal communcation is a facet of listening. Perhaps I am speaking of something more broad and inclusive than listening, because at times seeing and feeling are facets of this listening. Perhaps I mean observing, but observing often has this connotation of being clinical and removed from the situation, even though we now understand that the observer and the observed affect each other.

    Francis of Assissi, by Eugenio Hansen

    I like listening to things that are not human. The wind, the feeling of sadness that wells up within me at surprising times, the grunting-squealing sounds my dogs make. When I allow myself to pay attention to these things, I am often surprised by their complexity of sound and the depth of information received. When I am listening, my intuition organizes the sensations and providing some insight or interpretation that has some truth value. To access this truth requires being in relationship, to remember that what “I think” is not the sole determinant of truth.

    So much fails when I take my perceptions and beliefs as true and listen only for what corroborates these things. When I listen in this way, I’m less likely to learn, less likely to connect. I may become defensive or combative, pushing back against information that challenges what I think. I mis-hear things and do not doubt my experience. I hear Taylor Swift singing about lonely Starbucks lovers and create a whole story about what I think her song is, until I learn those were not her lyrics at all. Or I try to listen to someone in pain and, through my discomfort and perhaps well-meaning intention to connect, I assume that I’ve shared their pain. So I jump on the conversation, take their language, say “Oh the same thing happened to me, this is how I dealt with it.” When I listen in these ways, I cause alienation and hurt to others. I respond as though my beliefs are the truth and dismiss or overlook what the other person is trying to share with me. I become more occupied with being right than connecting.

    I once thought that the beginning of anger was the end of listening, but I was doing a disservice to anger. Even with conflict, there can be listening to what in me feels angry, what needs care, justice, or a boundary; and being open to the anger of others in the situation. It’s harder for me to stay with listening when there is anger, but if I feel safe then I can re-engage. I can offer my point of view firmly so that we can have a clear conversation, we can know what is at stake for each other and perhaps better understand why we’re disagreeing. So often I listen to arguments between people and think that on some level they are in agreement, but there is some difference in language or emotional quality that causes each to think the other is in conflict.

    I am still learning how to listen. I often forget. I often retreat to what feels known because part of me thinks I’m not ready to learn something new. Some part of me grows weary of openness and wants to simply react. I am listening to that, too. I am doing my best to notice when I’ve stopped listening, take a breath, and try to hear something new.

  • You are the Cup

    In several recent conversations, I’ve heard and contemplated the divide between spiritual orientations of “working on one’s self” and “being in service” to something greater than the self—deity, community, or human liberation as examples. This separation, to me, is unfortunate and unnecessary, although I recognize the value of certain critiques.

    There is no doubt that many spiritualities today have become a commodified and defanged way to make one’s self “feel better” and enjoy “prosperity,” cut off from one’s larger relationships to systems of inequality, human suffering, or the costs of our prosperity to the environment. Much of the pop “New Thought” technologies, like The Secret, capitalize on what often look like ego-level wants and not soul-level desires: manifesting thinness and not a health in a body-affirming culture, manifesting material luxuries and not a life of gratitude and connection. Christian “prosperity” work often looks no different.

    In response to this trend, I notice spiritual practitioners who seem to eschew work on the self as hubristic, indulgent, and a distraction from being in service to that which is greater than one’s ego wants. They make comments that make other people nervous, prioritizing service and the needs of divinity or the Earth above human needs. (Which is not a problem, really, as human needs may well fit neatly within the circle of these larger needs.) They are sincere and devoted practitioners, and yet sometimes one can glimpse the immense personal costs of their work. I think the danger of this approach is neglecting or minimizing one’s own needs and human worth. Humanity is one thread of existence rather than the apex of Creation, as Western theological thought once attested, but we matter in the web of existence, we are here for a purpose and we have our own worth and value. Being in integrity with ourselves helps us to be in service.

    Ace of Cups, from the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot

    “Know thyself” is an injunction passed down from the Delphic maxims, and for me this is the basis of spiritual work, though it is not the end. If our purpose is service to something larger than ourselves, then we are like the chalice into which rich dark wine is poured. The wine is not of ourselves and not for ourselves, yet that does not mean the self is irrelevant. We must make our selves into a cup suitable for this work. We can recognize the filters and toxins through which the wine must pass into ourselves, and we can make ourselves conscious and cleansed so that the wine can move through with greater purity. We can learn to discern between good wine and bad wine. We can keep our vessels strong so the work continues. If our foundations are weak, or our boundaries cracked, then the influx of power and energy that comes from this divine wine may well further crack and break down the cup.

    Stepping away from the analogy, to some extent I think we need to know and honor our basic needs, even our ego-level needs, to be of good service. If I am not aware of and addressing my needs for friendship, for love and acceptance, for intimacy, then I am in danger of meeting those needs covertly in ways that would be harmful. We can easily see this when we look to all the abuses of spiritual leaders and priests who cross boundaries and exploit their positions of power to get their needs met by students or laity.

    When I think of working on the self, I think of going deeper and deeper, layer by layer, always finding new ways in which my biases and complexes inform and deform my perception. There is no end to this process, so I cannot wait until I’m “done” before I act, but I can begin building habits of thought and action that support me in doing the work of self and service. The more I work on self, the more I see how deep and wide the Self extends. If I see in myself only an atomized individual, disconnected from the world and my communities, then I am very limited. Self ripples out to larger and larger circles of being, including my family, my communities, my planet. Self and Other are interdependent, and caring for one supports caring for the other.

    Yet even with this larger perspective, I remind myself that I am not the ocean but a drop. I am separate, that I might be in relationship. If I were the ocean, I would not be suited to the task of being in service. I am a cup that I might bear the holy wine.