You are not broken.
Author: Anthony Rella
-
On Practice and Change
For almost seven years I have committed to a daily meditation practice. Some days I am only able to manage a few minutes, other days I sit for a half hour. I go through minutes or weeks in which during meditation my mind wanders to television shows I recently watched, conversations recently had, things I want for myself, things I worry about, anything but attention to what is happening in the present. Recently I sat, after a long period, and became aware of an exquisite sense of discomfort and attention to the dark blankness that lay behind my eyelids. An acute sense of boredom came upon me.
“Ugh, I’m stuck in here with myself.”
The practice of sitting still and focusing on breath or observing myself sounds simple, but simple is not easy. A lot of the problems people create for ourselves seems to come from our resistance to simplicity. We have to train ourselves to become simple, which requires a surprising level of complexity. Every time the mind wanders from the practice, we have to invite our attention back again and again. We develop skills of will, self-observation, delaying gratification, enduring discomfort, emotional self-management, these complex subroutines that contribute to moments of stillness and inner silence that deepen and expand into rich presence.
Any skill worth cultivating requires such practice. When beginning a practice, we might be tempted to compare our clumsy first steps to the elegant performance of a master, but again any master has put in time and discipline to reach such grace and simplicity. Hours of practice forge that appearance of effortlessness.
From the Golden Tarot by Kat Black To change ourselves requires such practice, discipline, and self-forgiveness. There may always be a part of me that feels disgusted with myself, that would rather be anywhere but in this body, in this life, but there is another part of me that knows sitting with all of this helps me to connect with something greater than the individual pieces, greater than the momentary discomfort, greater even than the self-loathing. Spiritual traditions point toward these greater realities and advocate practices and values to help people grow into them.
Making any change in our lives means confronting the ambivalence that keeps us stuck. Ambivalence is different from indifference, though often we use them interchangeably. Indifference means not caring at all, one way or the other. Ambivalence means caring very strongly in two opposing directions. “I really want to meditate this morning, and I really want to hit snooze and get more sleep.” No matter how often I go to the gym and value the benefits of regular exercise, a part of me wants to convince me that I’m not feeling up to the task and would be better served eating chocolate and resting on the couch.
Resistance will meet whatever it is we need to make our lives better — taking medication, going to therapy, reaching out to loved ones, eating well. That resistance is what helps us to become stronger. We do not develop muscle or aerobic health without pushing against a physical resistance. Our bodies and spirits need something to push against, and they also need time to rest. Too much of one or too little of the other both create problems. Ambivalence points toward the need to recognize these conflicting impulses and strive to find some way to honor both.
If I want to know myself, love myself, and be the most myself I can be, I need to sit with the part of me that gets bored, hates myself, and criticizes all my flaws. I need to practice bringing my attention back to the more that is happening now. There is always more than this problem, whatever problem holds your attention. There is always another breath to take. There is the firm support of the ground and the expansiveness of the sky.
Changing one’s self requires accepting one’s self as we are now. Worthwhile, deep, profound change comes from taking on a discipline and returning to it regardless of how one feels. It’s hard to exercise four times a week, but the benefits of maintaining that rhythm are healthier and longer-lasting than what comes from taking short cuts to force one’s body into a socially acceptable shape. This kind of discipline is imperfect. After seven years, my mind still wanders in meditation, and I forget to bring it back. Seven years is truly not that long, but the person I have become in that time has depended upon that foundation of cultivating inner stillness and self-observation.
-
Advice for a New Year
Ignore perfect answers.
Perfect, instead, mistakes.
Befriend and tend your shame,
that nuzzling beaten pup
whimpering through thin bars,
mutt tongue licking your heart.
Notice the traps you set
For friends and enemies
To prove trustworthiness
Again. Watch as they fail,
disappointed to your
expectations, or spend
your strength to help them win.
No problem having problems.
No worrying worry,
no fearing future fear.
Try hoping hopefully,
enjoying joyfully.
My father gave advice
About taking advice:
“Just say ‘Thank you,’ and do
whatever you want to.” -
Sacred Marriage: I Am… Sasha Fierce
After my lengthy close reading of archetypes, identity, and relationship in Beyoncé’s album B’Day, I debated whether to continue the exploration for later albums. This series of explorations comes out of a long-term series of conversations with my best friend Woods. Both of us are around the artist’s age and were in college together when she released her first solo album. We regularly discussed her music and her presentation of her particular intersections of race, gender, and sexuality. Earlier this year, I read an article by Nitsuh Abebe called “Why Can’t Beyoncé Have It All?” This article seemed to summarize everything we had ever discussed and contained this gem: “A few years ago, Beyoncé “killed” Sasha Fierce—or, rather, reintegrated Sasha, a process I wish Carl Jung were alive to ask her about.” As someone who is perhaps inordinately fascinated by both Jung and Beyoncé, this stuck out to me as an invitation and challenge. In re-listening to her works, I perceived creative alchemy, a unique process of individuation that has continued with her recent creative emergence, Beyoncé.
-
Healing and Need
Working in community mental health, I have thought and re-thought and will continue to re-think the value of mental health care for people who struggle with poverty and oppression. My clients have many barriers to good housing and employment, including mental illness, poverty, and criminal histories. Even some of the most generous assistance programs are unwilling to work with certain criminal backgrounds, and I am left wondering what to do. I am one piece in a network of systems that at times can work beautifully well and at times utterly fail.
-
The Symbolic Dimension of Our Lives
A Pero Manescu (Q-Art) conceptual analog photography The part of us that lives in the unconscious is hard to sense yet easy to find. Jung coined the evocative image of “the Shadow:” banal, somewhat hidden, ever-present, often overlooked, at times sinister. Where there is light, there is a shadow. If a light is on, there is a shadow somewhere. Just behind you, under your fingers, in the places you aren’t seeing. We only have to shift our attention. Some folks experience this kind of work with a natural, intuitive instinct, knowing that attention to those dark unknowns can lead to transformation, freedom, and greater self-power. I think this is true personally and socially: what we deny as a culture keeps us sick. We see this in our most painful scandals: the cover-up might be worse than the crime, compounding an already awful wound with lies and manipulation. The evils we refuse to acknowledge in our hearts, families, and communities become toxic and connected to greater evils in our culture.
-
What is the Unconscious?
Western culture has internalized enough psychological language and insight as to give even the most uninterested person a casual understanding of concepts like the unconscious, at least to have heard a joke or cliché. This kind of awareness does not always carry with it the understanding of why anyone should care about the unconscious or how it could help us live a life of depth, meaning, and integrity.
(more…)
-
Softening
Take a breath and imagine yourself becoming soft. Imagine the hard shell of resentment starting to ease and bend. Imagine the ice of rejection melting into your heart. Breathe in those irritations and distractions, invite them into your field of awareness. Let your focus become soft. Breathe and notice the subtle sensations: what is in the corner of your eye, the gentle sounds in the background, the feeling of air on skin. Let your awareness settle on what matters but gently allow the rest into you. The energy and frustration of trying to push those things away can ease into a calm sense of openness. It needs space. Become soft.
Not to deny your own needs and values, not to sacrifice your hard-won boundaries. Not to deny your limits. Only let yourself become soft. Notice the irritation that comes with noise and distraction, that frustration when things do not go as you thought they should. Some part of us wants to deny reality, reject our senses, refuse what comes at us from our environment. We grow harder, rigid, we become angrier and lash out, we make ultimatums that we regret, we criticize or snap at people when a soft word might get us what we want.
“Lilly” by Tom Collins We might find ourselves ruminating on something said or done around us, some misspoken word or faulty opinion, some secret fear of being disliked or hated. Let that soften, that need to control what others say or do. Let soften that part of yourself that responds to the opinions of others. Not to push away, not to fix, not to say it’s unimportant. Imagine how it feels in your body to be distressed, and imagine that beginning to thin, to become soft and fluid.
Resilient, soft, responsive flesh and skin contains the human organism. A thin membrane separates our environment from our sensitive organs. The hardness of our bones gives us structure and form, but our softness enables us to move and flow through life, to adapt to constantly changing climates and circumstances. When we become hard and constrict, our fists and teeth clench, we shut down around suffering or anger, we close in upon ourselves. This shuts down possibility and potential. We lose the ability to respond creatively and make choices in line with our own truth. We become responsive, avoidant, combative. Tense muscles become more prone to exhaustion and injury. Constant and worry anxiety drains the nervous system. Constant anger raises blood pressure and harms our relationships.
We can remember how it feels to be in our soft bodies now, to breathe into what is clenching and imagine it relax. If this is not enough, we can breathe in and clench ourselves even more tightly, breathing in all that hardness and constriction, and then exhale completely, allowing the muscles to relax and loosen. With softness, we might feel vulnerable but we touch our true power in the moment. Not the power to force things to happen that we insist on happening. The power of recognizing what is, recognizing my true limits and potential, and the power to act from my whole self, in a way that feels correct.
-
What You Avoid Might Help You
The imagination is powerful and often undisciplined. Our minds fill in empty space with images and stories of what might be, and our bodies react as though those things are truly happening. What we imagine says so much about our personalities, our histories, and our relationships. What we imagine says so much about our mood and state of being at any moment.
If I’m busy and do not hear back from someone, I might forget about the message or focus on other things. If I’m feeling good and confident, I might assume they’re busy or working on it. If too much time passes and I feel insecure or tired, my imagination starts spinning different stories. Feelings of persecution may set in. I might imagine arguments between myself and the absent person, or imagine that I’m being ignored because I am worthless, or marginalized with deliberate intent to harm. I might imagine something bad happening to myself or the other person.
This is a common feature of people with anxiety, and most of us have some level of anxiety at some point or another. For people with high levels of anxiety, these imaginations can become so intense and frightening that they inhibit us from doing what we need to do. We might have piles of mail, dozens of unread emails, a voicemail box that is chock-full of unheard messages. We might have bills in collections and debt spiraling out of control, all because the idea of facing and dealing with it is terrifying and we have already admitted defeat. Or we’ve convinced ourselves that by ignoring a thing we are able to postpone defeat.
That’s not the case with everyone. I’ve learned that some folks might be active in managing these issues, calling the utilities and credit companies to attempt to negotiate for better payment schedules and adjust financial burdens. That conversation we’ve been dreading might be one that the other person wants to have. Help might be available if we can tolerate the anxiety and face the thing we’ve been avoiding. When we find ourselves worrying about what might be wrong or imagining things for which we have no evidence, can we stop, take a breath, and try to imagine something different? The goal is not to argue with anxiety, because to argue is to have already lost. We can stop letting worry set the terms of how we think. We can focus on what is working in life, times when we reached out and found help, or our own capacity to resolve the issue.
IMAGINATION by archanN To discuss anxiety in this way is not to say that our minds are always wrong. Some of us may find that we have accurate intuitions into what is happening, particularly with unspoken communications that we recognize are out of the norm. If you are prone to anxious ruminations, however, it may become difficult to parse out what is useful from what comes from your typical hopes or fears. We might take our cue from cognitive-behavioral therapy and ask ourselves, “What evidence do I have that this idea is true (or false)? What would it mean for me if this was true (or false)? If this is true (or false), what could I do with this information?” It might be time to take action, or to wait and gather more information. Sometimes we can spare ourselves hours of agony just by calling someone up and checking out our inner story with their thoughts or feelings.
This comes back around to the major point: while choosing to wait is an active response to a problem, avoiding the problem or anything that reminds us of it is not. By avoiding, we shut out information that could confirm or disprove beliefs, and wall ourselves up into a self-perpetuating loop of anxiety. I believe that people with anxiety are capable of courageously confronting their lives. Perhaps they need more courage than most to do what may look from the outside like simple tasks. We may find, with time, that confronting these anxiety-producing situations fills us with energy and drive.
-
Apologizing With Self-Respect
I have been a person who says “I’m sorry” a lot. Recently, I have noticed apologizing when I’ve done nothing wrong — someone bumped into my chair, for example. In the culture of the United States, this is considered a bad quality, particularly for a man: “I’m sorry” suggests I’m taking responsibility for a wrong, or lack confidence to take up space. Women in the United States are often reinforced to apologize for taking up space of inconveniencing others, culturally reinforced to make themselves physically small and unobtrusive. In some cultures, a person would be considered arrogant and boorish for failing to apologize and take others into consideration. We do lose an element of civility and mutual regard when we fail to take any notice of having inconvenienced or hurt someone. A friend once suggested substituting “excuse me” for times when I want to say “I’m sorry.” This may be a small gesture of politeness, but mutual civility is fed by such small gestures.
The complexity of gender, space, and consideration is brilliantly illustrated by the tumblr Men Taking Up Too Much Space On The Train. Image after image reveals what appear to be masculine or male-bodied individuals taking up more space on public transit than is necessary, at times crowding out others. Apologies and self-minimization is met by those who take up more space than is necessary, who seem unconcerned by their impact on others. These folks either think they have no reason to apologize or think that to apologize is to show weakness. The problem, to their minds, is that others are too sensitive or did not recognize what the offender really “meant” to do. The people taking up too much space on the train might not mean to inconvenience others, for example, but they are.
We see public figures causing harm or offense with their words and actions and then going through a fake ritual of conciliation. They say something to the effect of “I’m sorry you’re mad at me” and sign up for a sensitivity course. They say, “I was misunderstood or taken out of context.” They seem unaware of the harm done, they’ve taken no time to contemplate. The apology is about smoothing over image.
Photo by Greg Rakozy Apologizing does not have to mean, “I was completely wrong and you were completely right.” An apology accepts responsibility for a specific harm I have done. I may still be struggling to understand your hurt or offense, but I can listen to and appreciate that I have caused harm. I can recognize how I contributed to the situation, what I did that was not in line with my values. You may have done something that I feel justifiably angry about, and I can recognize that my behavior was not honorable.
