Anthony Rella, MA, LMHC

Author: Anthony Rella

  • Seven Scorpions, Part 1

    Photo by Andreas Praefcke

    After freeing Isis from Seth’s imprisonment, Thoth advised the goddess to hide in the marshes. To protect the goddess and er unborn son, Horus, Thoth provided Isis with seven scorpions. Isis disguised herself as a beggar and began the long journey. When she needed rest, she stopped at the house of a rich woman to ask for food and a place to sleep. The rich woman slammed the door in Isis’s face, not knowing who the goddess was. Isis continued searching for shelter and found a poor fisherwoman who welcomed her, fed the goddess, and gave her a place to sleep.

    As the goddess slept, the scorpions shared their rage over the rich woman’s refusal. They combined all the poison into the stinger of the leader, who went to avenge their mistress. The scorpion snuck into the wealthy woman’s house searching for her, but came upon her infant child first, and poisoned it. When the rich woman found her child suffering, she ran into the town crying out for help. Isis heard the child’s cries and felt compassion. Realizing what had happened, she commanded the poison to leave the child’s body, calling out the name of each scorpion. When her child recovered, the wealthy woman showed her gratitude by giving a portion of her wealth to the fisherwoman who had sheltered the goddess.

    There are many facets to this story of the old gods of Egypt, but one that always comes to my attention is the relationship between the scorpions and Isis. The scorpions protect and shield the goddess from harm while she is pregnant and hiding from her enemy. Isis is not known as a timid or powerless deity, but her position at this point is vulnerable and she is best served by concealment and relying on the strength and generosity of others. What I find interesting about the story is that it does not show Isis revealing any personal outrage at being turned away by the wealthy woman, indeed she offers little commentary at all. Imagine—her husband has been murdered, her kingdom is lost, she has to hide from the man who wants to imprison her and would destroy her child if he learned about it, she has humbled herself to keep safe, and she finally musters up the will to ask someone for mercy only to get the door slammed in her face. One might understand if she would want to shed some tears, or scream, or say unkind things about the woman, but we see nothing. Instead, the scorpions gather all her rage unto themselves and, while she sleeps, take vengeance for the slight.

    Looking at the microcosm of the human personality, I think of the scorpions as those barbed, poisonous parts of us that formed for our protection but can quickly and easily turn hostile and destructive. The scorpions have a job to do, but their guardianship turns toxic and aggressive, particularly when she is unconscious. These are the little slights, microaggressions, even the large oversights that come out in ways from which we could plausibly distance ourselves. The sarcastic compliment, the faint praise, the condescending correction, the malicious gossip, “mansplaining,” the offensive comment that was “just a joke”! Even sometimes the “accidents” that are not fully accidents, those subtle provocations and digs that spur the moment to a crisis.

    When we cling to resentment and pain and refuse to face the problem, the toxins emerge nevertheless, as fatal to a relationship, a project, a team as any aggressive confrontation.

    Isis-Serket as the Scorpion, between circa 663 and circa 346 BCE

    I remember working in a somewhat visible community role with another person who had joined the group after repeatedly and publicly criticizing our work. We attempted to include this person and their critiques into the process of changing community, but this person had a habit of veiling his critiques by referring to authorities who were not in our community or alluding to a mysterious group of people who hated us. “So-and-so thinks that this is the way things should be done.” “A lot of people out there hate our community, and we need to change their minds.” I experienced this as demoralizing and frustrating, and soon I no longer wanted to listen to this person. I realized that it is impossible to address complaints from invisible people who were unwilling to speak for themselves—if indeed they existed and were not convenient ways for the speaker to evade making his own stand. Several of us on the committee asked him to speak from his own perspective and voice his own complaints, but he rarely owned his own opinion and it became impossible to work constructively with him. This pattern repeated itself over numerous conflicts involving him and other members of the community. I advocate working as though people are acting in good faith, but good faith is hard to gauge when a person is unwilling to step forward and address conflict directly, take responsibility for their own actions and contributions, and take responsibility for their piece in resolving the conflict.

    This is one example, but I think each of us has our own set of scorpions, and like Isis we would do well to learn their names and become conscious of how they work and what harm they can cause. Next week, I will talk more about naming and salving our poisons.

  • The Lion and The Stillness

    Strength, Visconti Tarot (15th Century)

    I keep an oracle on my desk, a pot filled with challenges, and the one I drew said to deal with something that I’d been avoiding. I felt annoyed and swore at myself for having left this oracle in the first place, a trap waiting to spring. If I dig deeply enough beneath the habits of avoidance, postponement, and procrastination, I eventually find dread.

    Dread is the lion at the mouth of the cave wherein my life’s energy and purpose is trapped. The lion shows up as anxiety, fear, even anger. The lion is something I do not trust, something dangerous and feral that stirs in me the immediate urge to resist. Why on earth would I want to go face a lion, even if the most precious treasure lies behind him? What would I do when I face the lion, unprepared and ill-equipped as I am to fight?

    Instead of facing the lion I find other ways to spend my time, knowing all the while that he keeps what I desire. I check Facebook for hours, I go buy a box of cookies and eat it all, I sleep a lot, I exercise excessively, I work a thousand hours per week, I get into petty arguments on the Internet with people who do not exist in my daily life, and all the while in the back of my mind I know there’s a lion who’s guarding the only thing that truly matters to me.

    In my imagination I’m a badass warrior who takes down the lion with one blow, or I’m such a glorious being that the lion immediately bows before me. On the other end, in my imagination the lion devours me in one gulp, or strips me apart bit by bit. For all my fear, I don’t know the lion, I only know my image of him.

    When I decide, finally, that I can no longer survive in a world where I allow this lion to control what’s mine, I turn and walk toward him. Not knowing what will happen, the anger and dread rise within me and all I can do is keep breathing and seeking stillness. The lion returns whatever energy is directed toward him; he terrorizes the terrified; he assaults the angry; he devours the anxious. What I can do is breathe deeply into stillness. The anger is there, the fear is there, and I am there, breathing in stillness and breathing out softness. Each breath is a spell on myself, a spell to become something soft and supple, something that can adapt to the moment but move forward.

    From this stillness emerges something quiet and profound. A love that reaches across the space. Eyes meet and still there is anger, still fear, still stillness, and I am there, breathing with it all and walking forward, and the lion is there, approaching me. When we meet, the lion’s mouth opens and within is the cave wherein my energy and purpose is kept. When we meet, I am fully myself and more than I was before.

    The lion is always waiting.

    Buddha under the Nagas, Nong Khai, Thailand — by jpatokal

  • Deepening into the Dark

    At this time of year in the Northern Hemisphere, when the playful activity of summer begins to cool and withdraw into fall, I feel my energy draw inward. This can feel depressive, especially to someone prone to it, but the quality is different. The period from spring and summer feels like a time of broadening and expanding outward, engaging in new activities, finding new friends, planning and executing, working, playing. When fall occurs, I feel it is time to deepen and sink, to go more inward, to shift attention from relationships that feel casual to those that feel more nourishing, at times more intense. In my early twenties, I remember that there was a belief that now was the time to find an intimate partner, if you did not already have one, so you could share the winter months with someone intimate. Rarely, of course, did that work out as planned, but to me it speaks of that seasonal movement of energy. We are as much animals as we are anything else, but sometimes we forget our relationship to the seasonal cycles.

    Sandro Botticeli, La Carte de l’Enfer

    The roots of the psyche lie in murky, deep, mysterious territory, and sometimes we need to sink more deeply into it. The ego develops its habits and stories to support a sense of self, and that is as limiting as it is necessary. Making room to grow, change, or discover something new about the self means that the ego needs to relax and let awareness sink, finding the truth or insight that lies beneath the surface. Our dreams always offer us a new insight, an expanded perspective, a truth that can heal and balance us, but dreams come from our larger Self and tend to push against the waking ego’s habits and beliefs. In a dream, we might feel a sense of truth and power that follows into those early waking moments, only to later look back and wonder, “What the hell did this even mean? This dream makes no sense.” The ego is the part of us that says it makes no sense, the dream is meaningless, because the dream truth is beyond the ego’s blind spots and limitations, and the dream symbol has a deep truth that cannot be completely characterized by logical description.

    Dream work, trance work, automatic writing, and art are some ways of connecting with the deeper Self and becoming open to its larger insights and deeper mysteries. We do not have to kill the ego to benefit from these, but we have to practice alternate ways of thinking and processing information. Dream work in groups can be useful for bringing up elements of the dream that the dreamer’s ego cannot recognize. Looking at mythological symbols and archetypal patterns, making art, even writing down the dream and reviewing it later allows us space and time to process and integrate the dream truths. The ego’s refusal of meaning is not the entire truth, it is the moment in which the ego feels threatened and wants to clamp down. If we want to grow, we need to breathe and keep contemplating.

    In truth I do not think it is necessary or useful to throw out the logical, rational side of the mind, only to be able to integrate irrational, intuitive insight when possible. When life feels confusing or dried up, when I feel despair or lacking in creativity, I turn toward the unconscious dimensions of the Self to find the mystery that refreshes and invigorates. In turn, I think our communities, our cultures, even our species has its own larger unconsciousness, facets of which make up what Jung called the collective unconscious.

    If you are in Seattle and looking for support sinking into your larger Self for inspiration or renewal, consider the Diving into Enthusiasm workshop I am organizing for November.

  • Seeking the Way of Integration

    Decisiveness is not a strong suit of mine, but for much of my life I’ve had this drive to do something. The problem was settling on what something to do. At times, I could envision multiple ways to use my energy, all of them exciting and crystal-clear in my mind as possible. Other times, I felt void of ideas, and even the ideas I already had felt lifeless or beset with barriers and problems. Taking a step in one direction called up all the inner voices that spoke against that step. This weakness can be a strength.

    Not everyone seems to have that problem. I’ve met folks who seem to have the opposite problem, to stride forcefully and purposely with outward confidence and no overt reflection. Perhaps this post is not about them, or perhaps their own inner contradictions are lying beneath conscious awareness. Instead, the people around them try to reach out with advice and challenges and feel unheard, unacknowledged, even as the person walks right off a cliff. This strength can be a weakness.

    Duality is useful but false when taken too literally. In truth, the multiplicity of options before us is so vast that thinking too much can overwhelm us. Reducing things to two polarized possibilities can help to focus our thinking, but it becomes limiting when we try to make one option “win” over the other. If two ends of a polarity pull on us, then certain aspects of ourselves have attached to either end, and to choose one at the cost of the other is difficult and self-defeating.

    In his commencement speech at Wesleyan, Joss Whedon made a useful and well-stated observation about choices and identity:

    When I talk about contradiction, I talk about something that is a constant in your life and in your identity. Not just in your body, but in your own mind in ways that you may recognize, you may not. Let’s just say hypothetically that two roads diverged in a wood, and you took the path less traveled. Part of you is just going—look at that path over there! It’s much better. Everybody’s traveling on it … Not only is your mind telling you this, it’s on that other path. It’s behaving as though it is on that path. It is doing the opposite of what you are doing. And for your entire life, you will be doing, on some level, the opposite, not only what you are doing, but what you think you are.

    I speak of this inner opposite often, which correlates to the Jungian notion of the anima or animus. We have this sense of who we think we are, but within us we contain the opposite. If we can breathe into this and hold polarities, new possibilities emerge that are creative, dynamic, and integrated. Instead of trying to choose between passion and security, what would it look like to honor the parts of me that desire both and let that tension open the way?

    (more…)

  • Arising, Sustaining, Dissolving

    From Western alchemy we inherit a threefold process model. One articulation of the Sulphur-Salt-Mercury triad could be these three phases of process: arising, where processes begin or initiate; sustaining, where processes maintain or perpetuate, are nurtured or grown; and dissolving, where processes loosen, decay, transform, and die.

    We can think about our goals, ambitions, and projects as larger triangles in which this process unfolds through many micro-triangles. Two years ago I launched his blog and committed to posting one entry a week, which was its arising. Now I continue to honor that commitment and promote the writing as best I can, sustaining it. Some day I may end this commitment and dissolve this blog, perhaps turning its content into a book, perhaps erasing the content in a fit of piqué, perhaps simply stopping altogether. I’m only listing possibilities.

    In the meantime, each entry of this blog is its own process of arising, generating ideas and starting the first draft; sustaining by continuing the draft unto completion; and dissolving by editing the draft and eventually declaring it “done enough” to publish.

    Being and Becoming 2, by Berta Rosenbaum Golahny

    Each phase is necessary. Dissolution opens the space for something new to arise. Each phase also has its attraction and challenge. How do I know when it is time to move from one phase to the next? Confusion over phases of work leads to conflict in groups. One person commits to sustaining the project as it is, and sees it as their role to protect the project from any threat to its continuance. Another person thinks the project broken, flawed, or damaging, and wants to push for its dissolution. Another person has all these new ideas for ways to change the project, and wants to let those arise. In my observation, the person committed to sustaining tends to have the most power, in part as a function of the role itself. We need power to keep something in motion, and power-over derives in part from fear of changing things as they are.

    Identifying our work phases is like the orienting practice of “triangulation,” finding where one is by picking three visible landmarks, finding those landmarks on a map, and using the angles of vision to approximate where one is. When I think about where I am in relation to my dream, am I still in the process of arising, initiating change? Do I need to dissolve some responsibilities or habits that are taking time and energy away from my goals? Do the processes in place sustain me, do they need sustainment? What’s working? What’s not working?

    One lesson this model offers is that we can inhabit each phase fully and allow the energy of our project to move in its own way, in its own time. I can begin with a simple intention—“I want more intimacy in my relationship.” I can allow intimacy to arise within me, to suggest activities that would increase intimacy, to start new habits, to start conversations. If I can do this without too much attachment to what “intimacy” should look like, I have more flexibility and focus to discover what ends up working in my relationship, and then bring those working strategies into the process of sustainment. I can also discover what does not work, what impedes intimacy, and let those strategies dissolve.

    Presence with the process where it is, as it is, helps us to flow into the next best step with greater ease and less distress. When a process is ready to die, then sustaining it only causes stress. When a process is so deeply entrenched that to challenge would be taboo, we might better focus our efforts on dissolving rather than trying to start something new. At the same time, we might step away from the entrenched process altogether and focus on the arising, bringing something new into the world that might one day challenge things as it is once it has the strength and sustainment to tolerate a direct challenge.

    What is arising in you? What are you beginning or longing to begin?

    What needs nurturing? What needs to be sustained?

    What is dissolving? What is ending?

    If you are looking to reconnect with enthusiasm or integrity in your work or life and in the Seattle area, consider checking out this workshop coming November 6, 2014.

  • Questions on Enduring with Integrity

    Lately I have been pondering the challenge of sustaining effort toward a desired goal. My tendency is to become excited by a new idea, a new project, a new vision, to spend a great deal of energy in the stages of creation, and then to quickly lose enthusiasm when it comes time to make that work real, to make it manifest. The lesson for I need is how to settle into the long-term work of sustaining and nourishing my project, to return to the work regularly and find ways to bring energy or passion to the parts that bore me, sometimes harder than the parts that feel scary.

    The Knight of Pentacles, from the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot

    I’ve been blessed to know and befriend many passionate people with long-term desire to make change, whether it’s personal change, change in one’s work culture, or change in the world. In my observation, change-motivated people start with dreams, ideals, and passions, and then get to endure the fixed structures and limiting realities that slowly shape that energy into something denser, more grounded, and at times vastly different and more compromised than the original vision. There is work we do because we’re passionate about it, and there is work we do to make money to make our lives possible. Some lucky people are able to find the space where those spheres overlap, but so many of us sacrifice one and dedicate ourselves to the other, which has a cost.

    When faced with discouragement and feelings of powerlessness to make change, we might consider taking the route of convenience and power-over. We might forego honesty and integrity to ingratiate ourselves to the holders of power and the status quo. We might bend our life’s will to overcoming adversaries and overlords only to find that we’ve submitted our well-being to the quest for vengeance. If we cannot face that which we hate and resist in ourselves, then we are in danger of becoming it.

    I am contemplating how to restore passion and integrity to the process of my daily work, to keep my long-term vision firmly grounded in my everyday tasks and interactions. In turn, I ask how I can keep my vision responsive and open to change without sacrificing my sense of integrity. Too rigid an attachment to my view of how things “should be” could make me ineffective or tyrannical.

    What helps you to avoid becoming too fixed in your opinions?

    What helps you to refresh your enthusiasm and commitment for your long-term work?

    What helps you to remember the journey that you’re on? To be present to the path?

    What helps you to hold fast to what matters and let go of what does not?

    EDIT: To continue to explore and address these questions, I am organizing a workshop to occur in November. If you are in the Seattle area, please check it out. More to come.

  • When Things Get Tough, Keep Going

    The rush of a new idea sizzles and crackles. Inspiration has hit, and the vision unfolds—of a new project, a new business, a novel, a way of being that seems suddenly possible, logical, and clear. When we are lucky enough to receive these flashes, we can become fixated on the pursuit of them. That energy wants to go somewhere, wants to act and make happen. We see what is possible and become impatient for that world to unfold, short-tempered with the people and obstacles that do not share our vision and seemed driven to impede the process, or simply ignore it altogether. That brilliant lightning flash threatens to burn away these connections as we pursue it with determination.

    The world is not set up to support logic and clarity, however. Where the rational mind wants a direct path from inspiration to execution, the process of making an idea manifest is circuitous and beset by chance and change. The sevenfold alchemical process provides a map of the process—from the purest stage of ideation, the thought passes through opposition and refinement until it can finally become manifest, and then the manifest reality itself experiences conflict and opposition until finally taking its mature expression. Every artist and creator can speak to the gap between the idea and the reality—the novel that seems so perfect when unwritten and becomes something wholly other by the time it is published. The gestating child, surrounded by its parents’ hopes and fears, that eventually becomes its own adult.

    This lesson seems hardest for people who are intellectually oriented to appreciate. Because the image is so clear and resonates so loudly, the disappointment and effort to manifest seems somehow wrong, any compromise from the vision a betrayal. These limitations and conditions are where the creative process becomes deeply engaged. If we do not see these as problems and signs of failure but rather opportunities for innovation and refinement, the creator discovers opportunities and lessons to include in their work. That ferocious energy of innovation ripens into the quiet determination of completion, producing results again and again. Our will gets energized by that energy of inspiration and creation, which gives us the power to keep moving through the stages of involution and evolution in spite of the challenges that inevitably beset the process.

     

  • Commitment

    In conversation recently, someone expressed, “I have problems with commitment, and it’s stressing me out.” We were discussing a significant change of circumstances, an investment in place to which this person had never committed before. They recognized the value that more permanency would offer them and thought committing to place would be joyful, but instead they felt stressed, thinking about how familiar it was to move about almost at will, with minimal attachment.

    During the conversation it occurred to me that when we say we have a difficulty committing to something, often the difficulty arises in what we imagine when we think about commitment. If I want to make a commitment like “I am going to commit to a month without using a car,” then immediately I begin to have concerns and experiences with even the idea of commitment. I think of all the conveniences I would be giving up. I imagine all the inconveniences. I imagine the relief from finances. I become fearful about times when I might need the car. I begin spinning this idea of what my life will be and then I decide as though this idea was an accurate picture of how things will be. Maybe I decide I could never live without my car because I wouldn’t have the resources to do all I can do now. Maybe I will rush out and sell my car before I’ve really thought through the problems and consequences, because I got hooked by thinking about freedom from financial obligations.

    This mental work is not bad. It is useful. What I realized is that it’s important to remember that what I imagine is not going to prepare me completely for what the experience will be. When I commit to something, especially something I’ve never done, I am committing to uncertainty, risk, and adventure. This is the opposite of what most of us think when we talk about “commitment.” Many people think of commitment as drudgery, being tied down to something, an eternal monotony.

    Commitment does require discipline and regularity to be effective. When I commit to a relationship, then I am likely committing to showing up and not disappearing at whim, although that depends upon the relationship and what agreements make sense. Either way, there is a structure that holds the commitment in place. When I commit to a job, I get up five days a week at the same time and go to the same place for eight hours. What happens within that span changes from day to day, moment to moment.

    City of Troy Labyrinth, Simon Garbutt

    What I think scares us about that kind of commitment is that it brings us into presence with ourselves in a way that is new and uncomfortable. There is a part of us that constantly avoids confrontation and seeks comfort, and that part loses power when we engage in the discipline of showing up to the same thing. We get to see all of our parts, the ones that thrive in commitment and the ones that despise commitment. We see our heart in all its messiness. Perhaps there will never be this sense that life is as it’s supposed to be. Perhaps there will always be a fear that I’ve committed to the “wrong” thing.

    Commitment is be an act of daring and self-creation. When we think of commitment as this eternal chain, we can look at it instead as a choice we make every day to show up to what is there. Some commitments become toxic, and we can show up to that and act accordingly. Some commitments become dry because we’ve stopped showing up, and we can show up to that. Some commitments are mysteries that grow as we grow, deepen and evolve as we walk them, like a labyrinth.

  • Vicissitudes

    Nothing the works the way I want it to. There, I said it, and I ended my sentence with a preposition. There’s an impatient, grouchy, childlike part of self that gets frustrated with this. It wants what it wants, it wants it the way it wants it, and it doesn’t want to wait for what it wants.

    That part of me has dreams for my life, and my adult ego sets goals to make those dreams real. I put will and effort toward those goals, and sometimes I achieve them. Other times, I fail. That’s when the child part of me has a fit.

    Failing is hard when I’ve put so much heart and effort into the work. When I really commit to making something happen, I follow my passions, I listen to guidance and still it doesn’t work. Then the child part of me wants to make meaning out of the failure. “I’m on the wrong path.” “I don’t have what it takes.” “I’m broken.” These stories do not make the hurt feelings easier to bear, and they do not make it easier to recommit to my goals and dreams. They are attempts to convince myself that it’s okay to give up, so I don’t have to risk failing again.

    This could be an end. I could give into despair and cynicism. I could let my life’s energy pool and stagnate with resentment and discouragement, insulting myself or blaming everyone around me. I could give up the passion that helped me to live the life I loved living.

    Energy does not move in a straight line. Attention cycles from task to task, even with deep focus and intention. Say that I want to create a beautiful garden and all I have is a plot of bare soil. One day, I go out to till and fertilize the soil. One day, I plant the seeds. One day, I weed. One day, I prune. One day, I harvest. When the time comes for each task, if I really want a garden, I need to do the work even if I do not feel like it. I also need to learn how to wait for the right time to work. The seed and soil have work to do, and it would be a shame if I sat staring at them, trying to force them to blossom with pure attention and will. There is so much other life to live.

    Say I reach the end of the season and my garden has languished. The fruit is bad, the flowers died. Could I have known this would happen when I started? Was all the effort of preparing and planting for nothing?  Would not starting at all have been any better? What am I to make of this? Was the soil bad? Am I lacking in skill? Was it a fluke? Was it bad weather? Did I learn anything? Can I try something different next season? Or should I give up my dream of a garden?

    Failure shows us a truth about ourselves we would never otherwise see. Feeling discouraged, hurt, and disappointed is hard. We might want to ignore it and punish ourselves by working twice as hard. We might want to numb out and detach. If I can sit with the discomfort for even a moment, allow the hurt to just be, then I pull that energy back into the shifting movements of life. The lessons flow into the next act. Perhaps I do not go back to gardening immediately. Perhaps I start smaller, with potted plants. Perhaps I go seek some teaching. Perhaps I spend the winter knitting.

    Despair can be the falling fruit that rots to seed new life. Despair can be the surrender to the larger cycles in which we live, knowing we have a small but significant part to play.

  • Sit There, Then Do Something

    “Why are we trying to think less when we need to think more? The neutered, apolitical approach of mindfulness ignores the structural difficulties we live with.” – Suzanne Moore

    “The abused are trained to not talk about the abuse. It keeps the system in place. And when it becomes necessary, not talking about abuse is brutally enforced. We are living in the Panopticon. We police one another. Or we cower under our blankets.” – T. Thorn Coyle

    As a therapist who works with mindfulness and is organizing a group called “Declutter Your Life!” I am someone implicated in Moore’s article, cited above, which is worthy of a read. With this article, and the recent events in the media, I feel the need to take a stand. I do not agree with everything Moore says, but I think she is speaks to real problem in the way we market and understand mindfulness work. In a religious context, meditation and mindfulness practice is not primarily about relaxation or feeling better, it’s a means of developing increased calm and focus to become more effective at doing the work the religion calls its adherents to do, which can include service to gods, service to humanity, and service to the Earth. In Western pop psychology, we took the technique out of its context and left a vacuum of purpose.

    Rushton, Kaszniak, and Halifax cite a definition of moral distress as ‘‘the pain or anguish affecting the mind, body or relationships in response to a situation in which the person is aware of a moral problem, acknowledges moral responsibility, and makes a moral judgment about the correct action; yet, as a result of real or perceived constraints,
    participates in perceived moral wrongdoing.’’ These authors are doing intriguing work studying moral distress among palliative care workers, but I think the concept has implications for all of us.

    We are living in an age of outrage, in which we are constantly bombarded by news and images that stir up moral feelings and empathy. Media feeds our horror and anger, emotions that want to move our bodies to action, for protection or nurturing, but for most of us it stops there. Maybe I think about going out and volunteering to deliver first aid to a devastated county and then think about how hard it will be to get vacation time from work, or board the dog, and who’s going to take care of the house while I’m gone? Or I get outraged by some news and feel afraid that talking about it at work in the wrong way will endanger the lifestyle that feels so secure and precarious at the same time.

    by Jason WIlson

    When the urge to act, the feeling becomes stuck inside, and we suffer. We return to self-numbing habits, shut down emotion, and avoid action. But the alternative often looks like going to unrealistic extremes, to feel overwhelmed, because the problems are so huge and I feel so small.

    In my approach to psychotherapy, Individuation is not about becoming more walled-off and separate from the world. Individuation is about recognizing who I really am and what really matters to me. The Self is embedded in relationships. My family, my cultures, my work community, and my country are all facets of my Self that I must recognize and integrate over time, including their darkness and complexes, because it all already affects me. I think this truth is harder to recognize for people in the US whose identities were treated as the norm, such as White people, masculine-gendered people, non-transgendered people, heterosexual people. These groups are not necessarily compelled to consider how culture, politics, and history shape their identities, whereas those who do not share those identities cannot see anything but that truth.

    Mindfulness, in my practice, is a technique for improving consciousness about one’s self and experience. We learn to dis-identify from thoughts, feelings, and sensations, creating space to understand our larger Selves, including those unconscious complexes that show up in patterns that affect us in ways difficult to recognize. These include complexes of culture, history, and identity. This includes awareness of the stress and pain that arises when I want to do something to help the world and stop myself. Mindfulness helps me to free myself of those automatic defaults to inaction and numbing. Self-observation helps me to see, “Oh, every time I want to do something I automatically think either I need to quit my job and start a revolution, or else I need to do nothing. Maybe there’s something in the middle that I can do.”

    Meditation is not about lying to ourselves. We look at the mirror of our hearts and minds and learn to see who we really are, including what matters, what is painful, what is challenging. As we become better at separating our thoughts, feelings, opinions, and sensations, the mind is freed to engage in more incisive analysis, to contemplate solutions to challenging problems with less reactivity. When the mind and body become more intimately connected, we learn how to step out of the energy-draining patterns of analysis and argument that keep us from taking action.

    The above-linked article from Rushton, Kaszniak, and Halifax offers a nuanced and useful articulation of the problems that arise with moral distress. Without emotional equanimity and self-awareness, many of our reactions tend up being about reducing our own discomfort. If I feel genuine empathy for your pain and I lack the skills to keep myself calm and remember this is your pain, not mine, then my response might be more about trying to get you to stop making me uncomfortable. Offers of “help” become self-serving and ignore the other person’s genuine needs. That’s how we end up saying, “Oh, don’t feel bad! Cheer up!” to people who are miserable or grieving. That’s how we end up in these loops of moral outrage, shouting and insulting each other to drown out the feelings of pain and helplessness. Mindfulness and self-observation help us to find our real boundaries. We can face someone who is suffering, feel their pain, and find out what they need from us.

    There’s a joke that in the West the saying is, “Don’t just sit there; do something!” and in Eastern spiritual traditions it is more like, “Don’t just do something; sit there!” In my opinion, Doing and Being are partners. When we act without reflection or examining our inner selves, I think we tend to react and perpetuate the problem. If we do nothing but contemplate and examine our inner selves, then we deny the world our gifts and ability to make change. I often see quoted the lines attributed to Gandhi about being the change we want to see in the world, and there is a truth to that, but we can also remember that Gandhi changed himself in a way that was radically confrontational to his culture and government, and his work was not isolated but done in community.

    I advocate for working on knowing yourself and finding mental and emotional healing. That is the work I do. If that’s what you need to focus most on now, that is a huge undertaking and worthy of respect. I think your healing can be the healing others need as well. I think the causes that touch your heart and move you are the causes that can further your own healing and the healing of the world. You do not need to start by sacrificing everything. You can start by reading a book to get more information, finding out who else is working on the issue and what they’re doing, showing up to an event and being present, having a conversation with someone who disagrees with you. Right now, you are co-creating the world. If it’s not the world you want, you are the best person to start making it so.