Anthony Rella, MA, LMHC

Author: Anthony Rella

  • Starting Fresh Takes Its Own Courage

    I missed my weekly posting last week, and nearly allowed myself to miss this week’s. I am in a major transition between one phase of life into a new one, and many things are changing personally, professionally, and socially. All of this is positive movement toward my goals, and I feel an inner pressure to present only a joyful, confident face to go with this. There is a fear that if I show any sense of the underlying vulnerability, insecurity, and grief, then that may mean I’m defective, or made a bad choice.

    While free writing, I wrote something like the title of this post, and realized one of the characteristics of change and starting fresh. There is a comfort in staying stuck in patterns, relationships, or circumstances, even the ones that no longer work, that are harmful, that inspire self-doubt and despair, or simply feel stagnant and need to change. There is a fear of what might happen if there is change.

    Stepping into the unknown change takes courage. So does the steps after. We move into a new neighborhood and don’t know the people, don’t know where the grocery store is, don’t know how to get to all the things we need. We start a new job and don’t understand the politics, the job is new, the technology and responsibilities are different. We risk meeting a new person for friendship or intimacy and don’t know their sense of humor, whether a particular joke is a compliment or insult, where their pet peeves and preferences lie. And we have to do all this work to discover those things outside of ourselves while continually deciding whether to stay open and vulnerable in revealing our own  preferences, wishes, opinions, insights.

    I’m not a believer in getting rid of fear, if only because I have not discovered the way. For me, courage is this recognition of the fear and vulnerability and continuing on regardless. I have done it before and survived. Now I might think well about my past jobs, relationships, and lives, and even miss some of the comfort and joy of them, but I was just as scared and vulnerable when I began those.

    Perhaps this is only scary for some. I have met people who seem to thrive on such change, but I only know their outward faces and did not know what was in their hearts.

  • Sense of Life

    What is your sense of the life that you long to live? Is there within you some image, some feeling, some idea, some sensation that speaks to you of what you desire, what you would work for, what you hope to make of yourself?

    For some, this image of desire is fleeting and hard to find. For many it arrives by disguise as inflated fantasies or fears, daydreams of being discovered as the next big rock star, fantasies of fighting on the front lines against evil, even nightmares of being chased by something repulsive. These fantasies might be overblown images attempting to get our attention to what in our lives desperately longs for attention, energy, and work. The repulsive monster could be the life-fulfilling project that you’ve avoided. The fight against evil might be simply engaging in an honest but confrontational conversation with a loved one. With these seemingly mundane activities, though, is a sense of being alive that calls uniquely to you.

    Spark of Life by HuMPHReY_92

    When life feels like it is a shambles, chaotic, and spinning out of control, tapping into this sense of possibility can be redeeming. We can sense into how action or inaction leaves us feeling. A step may be terrifying for good reasons or misleading reasons, but does moving into terror fill life with color, excitement, and vitality? Does engaging in another angry diatribe leave you feeling drained, despairing, and overwhelmed? These senses of life can guide us to what feels meaningful and rich. When we don’t know where to go, we can tap into that life we hope to have, and imagine what next step can take us closer.

    Sometimes sensing this possibility is painful, bringing up feelings of shame or self-abuse for failing to achieve something, or thoughts of it being impossible, or all the millions of genuine authentic-looking reasons that interfere with moving forward. All of these arise as traps to keep us locked within our own prisons of thought and expectation. A rich life is not one of untroubled happiness. Sometimes we have to shake things up a bit, step into conflict and mess, upend the gentle restrictions we’ve allowed into our lives.

    That sense of possibility and desire helps. Knowing where I want to go helps me to get oriented and direct my actions toward enlivening purpose. My values and sense of life feed the engine of living that makes everything else easier. As humans, I think we can tolerate distress when we believe deeply that we are choosing to do so to promote something important to us. Hell is suffering without purpose.

    Imagine in yourself there is some sense of purpose. Perhaps a word, a sensation, or an image, something stripped down to its barest essence. You might be gifted with a clear, comprehensible, coherent map of your destiny, but that is not necessary. Even a simple word like “peace” or a sense of energy and relaxation can trigger growth. We can let this carry us through distress when things get hard, and we can thread this quality through every moment of our lives if we are willing to choose it, over and over.

  • Movement, Stillness

    Author Brian Bouldrey once told me that in adulthood, every victory is conditional. That has stuck with me throughout my twenties and now early thirties, and I notice that we experience nothing that is not some mixture. Sometimes we lift our torches to the world and ask for what we want, and sometimes what we receive is not what we expected.

    I struggle with knowing what to do in these situations. My mind wants to clamp down and cycle through stories about why this is not right and fears about settling for what is offered. This is the cycle of a mind that is stuck within scripts and closed to information. The mind becomes constricted around beliefs about how things are supposed to be and not capable of achieving its natural, open, relaxed state wherein more becomes possible.

    Lately I find myself slowing down more when my mind wants to cycle into anxiety. I take a deep breath and notice the urge to keep searching, looking, thinking, debating, to keep busy and postpone the actions that would move life forward. Instead of energy moving, it becomes blocked and fixated. At the same time, simply acting from this blocked energy does not feel complete or whole.

    I can take a breath and imagine myself sinking inside, among the clusters of hurt and fear. I can notice what is happening within my physical body, within this environment, at this moment. All of this includes the cycling of mind and anxious movement of energy within. All of this includes the solidity of the chair, the gravity that keeps me anchored to earth. I can ask for help, for more information. I can make a decision, knowing that each decision is not an end but another step on a long and winding path. My being wants to be in relationship to this world, to be actively involved and in motion, to be still and seek rest.

  • We’ll see.

    “He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears.” – Michel de Montaigne

    This quote is on the wall of a room at my internship location. I contemplate this now as I sit with fear and excitement. On a personal level, I have accomplished some major milestones in the past few weeks, and now find myself poised to take the next steps in my life and career.

    I had the day off yesterday, and decided to allow myself a lot of space and ease. I had a modest to-do list that was accomplished early, and let myself have time to just play and watch funny shows, cook dinner and relax. I accepted the feeling of accomplishment and peace.

    I noticed, also, an undercurrent of fear. This fear seems to arise whenever I reach the end of a to-do list. A fear that feels related to the fear I feel when I think about where to go next in my life. Ahead of me is a big, empty future that lies untraveled. I know that its eventual shape will be unlike anything I can anticipate. Although I can steer my life, a lot will happen within and around me that is not in my power.

    “Forest Path through Trees” by happening stock

    The fear I feel seems in one facet to be of the emptiness and blankness ahead. Perhaps analogous to the fear of opening a blank document with the intention of writing, without a clear idea of what to write. That moment of comprehending the blank space, the anxiety of knowing I can fill it with anything, the fears of filling it with the wrong thing.

    What I think is comforting to me about the to-do list is how anchored it is to daily needs, joyful obligations, or other responsibilities that have some external correlate. What terrifies about the empty space is the realization that I am responsible for what I choose to do with it. We are offered many guides to living and moral precepts, yet there are times when we face a crossroads in which nothing seems quite right, quite on point. The choice has to come from within.

    What is the right next step? Will this choice lead to disaster or success? These are questions that cannot be answered definitively, except perhaps with “We’ll see.” I can consult elders, people further along on the path. I can consult ancient wisdom. I can pray. Every piece of guidance is useful, and no one but I has encountered this exact confluence, this precise choice.

    I will sink into my heart and inner knowing, noticing how I respond to each opportunity. I will trust myself to move forward, even if I make what later feels like a mistake. I will seek the peace that arises from acting in accordance with my values and inner guidance. I may need to walk into this fear with open eyes.

  • Catastrophe

    A crisis is a moment of opening, loosening, cracking apart. Lightning strikes and breaks open something that was supposed to be precious, sealed, preserved for years. Our day’s plans collapse. A relationship becomes something unimagined. All the work, hope, and fear is transformed into a new shape entirely. Shock and trauma may coincide with a crisis, leaving us reeling and lost.

    A crisis is not an end, though it can be filled with endings. Possibilities become foreclosed and lost forever. Pain long suppressed surfaces with fresh intensity. Suddenly we feel lost, confused, angry, hurt, or we’re so knocked around we don’t even have enough ground to sense what we feel. Things get lost, things get broken. We feel pain and shame, guilt and grief.

    A crisis has a way of distilling life down to its barest, rawest essence. True friends appear, false friends disappear. Relationships that are solid become stronger and more durable, other relationships crumble. Long-held secret hopes and fears come to light and are either validated or permanently resolved.

    The moment of sudden, startling change is upsetting, unnerving, and can feel like everything around us is coming to ruin. There is possibility in the ruin and collapse. Possibility for compassion, commiseration, for genuine being-there-togetherness. We can set aside the expectations of what should be and judgments of what is and turn toward each other with open hearts. We can turn toward the ruin and the pain, take in a deep breath, and begin moving forward.

    A crisis can be ruin, and it can be the cracking shell of a new seed of hope. We can only live our way into these possibilities.

  • Change

    Every goodbye is a hello. Each exhalation makes space for the next inhalation. The river moves, currents pulling forward, each molecule of water greeting the instantaneous confluence of light, space, earth, time, and passing into the next.

    Sometimes we feel stuck in time. Things that have occurred to us in the past, hurts that continue to hurt, joys that seem forever lost except for our floundering attempts to keep hold. Projects that accumulate because we cannot finish them and we cannot let them go. Empty space that remains empty. Desire left unspoken from the fear that if it’s gained, it will be lost.

    Every hello is a goodbye. The earth’s turn toward darkness and away from the sun. Pulling away the curtain of light to expose the stars, first one, then a hundred, then thousands if we’re lucky enough to live in clear darkness. Without emptiness, we have no room for something new.

    We can pause long enough to linger in the pain that honors connection. We can offer gratitude to all that has arisen and passed away in our lives. We can feel stuck, grouchy, and depressed because we know change is coming. We can stand and decide for ourselves to shape the change that occurs. We can long for a place of rest and keep walking. We can let go of what is no longer working. We can start something new.

    Hello to every breath, goodbye to every breath. This moment is sacred.

  • B’Day and the Virgin Queen

    An archetype is a shape, a meta-form, or collection of attributes and energies expressed in multiple forms. The concept calls back to Plato’s Theory of Forms that suggests every material thing has a mold or imprint of a kind, an abstraction that is the perfect and whole predecessor from which all material objects of its kind emerge. As we exist in materiality and specificity, we cannot comprehend the archetypal energy directly, we can only explore the world in all its messiness and complexity and, through specificity, uncover many facets of the archetype. To define an archetypal energy neatly is to separate out a facet from the whole. When we look at our humanity and creative expressions, we can view these things through archetypal lenses but lose something important when we reduce things to neat, cut-and-dried archetypes that become simply stereotypes. Archetypes are productive, dynamic energies, whereas stereotypes become closed, deadening shells. Yet as humans influenced by archetypal energies through story and culture, we can become identified with these concepts. This is a source of strength and a significant impediment, a narrowing of vision until we fixate on a particular role that does not include all who we are.

    Beyoncé’s 2006 album B’Day explores the archetypal Virgin in contemporary life. With this reading, I want to acknowledge some biographical material from Beyoncé’s life that is relevant but largely focus on the text of the album. I make no assumptions that my reading has anything to do with her lived experience.

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  • Sinking Beneath

    Does life feel like a perpetual series of crises? Does drama feel endless? When feeling stressed, is there a rush and overflow of thoughts and a feeling like action is needed now, now? Is there even an awareness of a gap between the stimulus and the reaction? Do we act out with immediacy, without consideration, leaping into familiar modes of saving, intimidating, or escaping?

    Within us are vulnerable places, old wounds or buried sensations stored in the body. Even the most well-adjusted and nurtured among us are likely to have something of the kind. Childhood can be wonderful and a terrifying, overwhelming experience. Traumas encountered as we grow and age can similarly become stored away, unprocessed, influencing us from behind the scenes.

    We might be more driven by these buried memories more than we realize. However we managed that situation as a child potentially informs the structure of our responses to anything else that feels similarly stressful or overwhelming. If anger was shut down, we may automatically shut down anger even when it is necessary for self-protection. If we had to contort ourselves to please confusing demands from our caregivers, we may grow up constantly attempting to read and adapt to the expectations of those around us, or to the mental images we carry in our minds of what those confusing caregivers would have wanted from us. Adults becoming more independent, complex, and mature at some point must face the contradiction of the childhood image of certain adults as near-godlike in their wisdom, beneficence, terror, or demand for obedience; versus the adulthood realizations of those same adults as simply human, flawed, loving, wounded, or scared.

    I do not advocate that we blame our adult problems on childhood lay them at the feet of our caregivers, but I believe strongly in the value of understanding how history has shaped and informed the present. Of particular importance is the way our story of history shapes our experience of the now. We do not have to start with the autobiography when stuck in crises or in compulsory emotional and mental responses that feel uncontrollable. We first start with noticing that this is our experience. Somehow I always seem to have this response in this kind of situation. I get angry when someone does this, and then feel embarrassed later when I realize what the person actually meant. If we are able to notice and have contact with the observing part of self, we can now learn to catch that response in the moment and sinking deeper. I’m getting angry, so I will take a breath and notice what else is happening. What’s going on in my body? What thoughts are coming up? What emotions do I find? What is similar to the past? With the metaphor of sinking, I imagine a storm troubling the surface of a pond, which is my usual awareness, and slowly dropping deeper beneath to still waters, able to gaze up and see the troubled surface.

    I do not advocate discounting all of our immediate responses as somehow inferior relics from childhood, either. Anger or fear may well be a legitimate response to something in the situation we cannot quite name, and perhaps that emotion is also made bigger by previous experiences or something we’re not quite recognizing. Sinking into a larger awareness of what is occurring helps us to get more information and make more accurate responses. If I do not feel I can address the situation accurately when I feel angry, I can come up with strategies to manage the anger until I’m ready.

    What I think brings balance is inviting the opposite into my experience. When I feel the urge to speed up, I can take a breath and try to slow down internally. When I feel the urge to lash out and protect, I can try to consider what is motivating the actions that feel like an attack. In major crisis situations, instinct is a valuable asset to help us through. If we can practice this slowing down and seeking balance in situations that are less urgent, we can become calmer and more effective in dealing with everyday matters and the big, scary crises if they come, as they come.

  • Heru-em-Anpu

    Disappointed heart,
    mourning eye rectified
    by obstinate will.
    Avenger, dissenter,
    fierce youth, scalding
    passion, aggrieved:
    make intention whole
    with the dark, enfold
    depth with lunar sight.
    Soften steel under
    opalescent light.

    Exalted son, dive into
    shadow. Redeem what
    seeks justice. Reveal
    to enemies your light,
    to allies their ignorance.
    Skirt underworld
    consciousness, rout
    pests and rot, seize
    upon demons and shake
    until they yield their names.

  • Meditation on Division and Wholeness

    Today I can stretch to include more of myself. I notice the urge to choose between and cut away, dismiss, or marginalize something. A part of me wants to say there is only one correct version of reality and the rest are deceptions, lies, or pathology.

    I notice my mind racing, trying to figure things out. I notice restlessness, the urge to act and do something, the belief that doing something will dispel the restlessness and bring me peace. I notice that acting and doing and thinking seem not to bring peace but support the cycle.

    I do not need to reject my mind, my activity, my busyness. Right now, I can take a breath into my center, and imagine I can drop my awareness into my heart. My heart carries another truth. My heart longs to experience this moment in all its juice, complexity, pain and delight.

    I can take a breath and drop deeper into my body. My body that wants food and water, wants to be active and wants to be still.

    What would it be like to imagine holding these parts together? What lies between the instinct to act and the longing for rest? What would it be like to feel both disappointed and grateful? Can I allow myself this completion? Can every part of me have a place at the table?

    Within these seemingly conflicted and contradictory parts of self is a wholeness. We can connect to this wholeness by noticing first the feelings of division, the apparent contradiction and conflict. If we can tolerate this, we can feel into the emptiness and space between parts. That emptiness is the fabric of Being, that which makes us whole. Within that space is stillness, silence, emptiness, the dark matter that allows the stars to shine.

    Do not be afraid of feeling divided. Invite your conflicts and contradictions closer. Let them speak, and take a breath, and imagine you can sink into the space between them.