Anthony Rella, MA, LMHC

Author: Anthony Rella

Man vs. Bear
Note: This was written with an audience of men in mind. Anyone is welcome to read it, but people who aren’t men might feel triggered by some of the content as it touches on themes of domination and violence, and has a compassionate tone that is sometimes triggering for people who have too often been compelled to set aside their own hurt and feelings and instead be compassionate toward men. If you are such a person, I am not asking you to do that, and I encourage you to take care of yourself.
Once, I chased away a black bear. It was a bright dry day in the New Mexican mountains, a mixture of desert and pine, where I worked as a backpacking instructor for a Scouting camp. We taught participants to be meticulous in bear safety—never leave out anything unattended that might attract bears, and avoid getting involved with them. For staff, we were given the extra task—if you see a bear getting too close to your camp, chase it away.
This was for the safety of both bear and human. Bears drawn to human encampments for food are naturally then more likely to have hostile encounters with humans. I’d heard stories of bears going into tents at night—I don’t know how true those were, but clearly that would be a problem. Bears that were too familiar, too drawn to humans, would therefore have to be put down by those monitoring the bear populations.
So it was a bright afternoon and I saw the black bear close to camp. I told my crew to stay together and ran toward the bear. It backed away several feet, but then it paused to look back at me, as though to see how committed I truly was. So I ran at it again, making my body big and shouting as I was taught, and the bear backed off several more feet, then paused. We did this three or four times before the bear finally wandered off, and I felt I’d done my due diligence.
Few animals are interested in getting into an unnecessary fight. We have all kinds of signals to let potential predators and competitors know we’re going to be a problem for them if they keep encroaching on our territory. We can hiss, we can bare our claws and teeth, and we can do this kind of feinting aggression—a lot of creatures do it, appearing to aggress at you only to back off before making contact. It’s a way of negotiating space and making a contract. If we have to fight, we’re going to fight, but we’re both going to get hurt and many animals can’t afford unnecessary hurt. So they’re not going to actually fight unless they’re desperate, wounded, or you’re a threat to them or their young. You have to know what you’re dealing with, however—you can chase away a black bear, but doing that with a grizzly is going to get you into trouble.
Chasing off a black bear is one of those stories I milked for a while. It was scary—I wasn’t sure if I would succeed or if I’d get in some bad trouble, but it felt amazing when the bear backed off and did what I hoped it would do. It felt so good to protect my crew, to keep the bear safe. There is so much pleasure in being a protector, especially when one is seen by others and feels their gratitude. So many men gravitate to this role, to this way of being valuable and of service to their community and loved ones, and take on so much hurt and damage in our efforts to protect. If we can feel in integrity and receive gratitude, it feels worth it.
But what about when we’re judged for our protectiveness? What about when we fail? What about when we’re told what we’re doing is unwelcome, though we still believe to our bones we need to keep them safe? What about when we’re told we’re not protectors, we’re actually harmers and abusers? That feeling is terrible. There is so much shame, and guilt, and resentment, and failure, that it’s almost inevitable we’d get defensive and bring everything we can to bear against that accusation. So many men don’t think of ourselves as the predator, we think of ourselves as the protector.
When we are really young, all we really want is to belong, to be loved, to be safe, and to get to be ourselves. When our kid selves experience being hurt, cast out, ridiculed, humiliated, sometimes they hold onto the pain and shame of those experiences. To my mind, kids are just innocent, even when they’re acting like assholes. They need adults to love, protect, and understand them, and it is a sorrow of life how often even the most well-meaning adults are not able to do that to the extent kids need.
Those young needs stay with us all of our lives, along with the hurt and judgment those young parts take in when their needs go unmet. We are like trees who age by growing new rings around the old. All of those younger ages are still contained within the trunk, and when you look inside you can still see the wounds they suffered and how those affect the later growth of the tree. We grow new layers of safety and protection to hide, but not heal, those wounds, and those protections add much of the richness of life. They’re not intrinsically bad. They mean well. And they can be unbalanced, and cause harm.
Becoming a feminist, for me, was a ring I grew around a young part of me that saw the women in my life, whom I loved, being hurt by men. I felt their hurt so keenly that I wanted to protect them as much as I could. Yet I was actually much younger than them, and I needed protection itself, and no one knew this was happening and had the clarity to tell me it was not my responsibility.
As a result, my continued growth took the shape of a person who feels much more protective of others than myself, much more concerned about their hurts and needs than my own. My story was, “I can handle anything, but I can’t believe they’d do that to you.” To my mind, it was noble to bear the suffering you would not allow for another person, so I developed the strange capacity to be able to speak up for others’ issues and problems with a lot of courage and yet remain terrified and anxious when it came to asking for something I needed.
This protectiveness was perhaps valuable, and yet it contained an inability to recognize the power and agency of those I decided to protect. In that protective state, I was unable to step back and ask—does this person want my protection? Are they asking me to speak on their behalf, or help them to advocate for themself? Are they truly confused and making bad choices, or are they dealing with their problems in a way that would totally make sense if I humbled myself enough to be curious? Do they even see this as a problem that needs protection?
When you get really fused with that way of being in the world, when you feel you are the protector and it’s all on you, then it’s easy to start to turn on the people you’re protecting. Here you are trying to keep them safe and somehow they just keep making the same stupid choices. They throw themself into the danger you just rescued them from. They seem ungrateful, ignorant, and heedless of your sacrifice. So then it starts to seem like a normal and comprehensible next step to start protecting them from themself—to control their movement, to limit their choices, to harangue and undermine them. And all the while, internally, you still feel that earnest desire to help. But from the outside view, your behavior is abusive.
When we’re really identified with our protector and we hear this—that others may see us as no different than the violent men we’d protect them from—it is devastating. Suddenly we feel all those little kid parts again who learned they were unworthy, they were embarrassing, they were unwanted. We are kids stuffed into adult suits. Emotionally we are acting as any kid would—wanting to be loved, wanting a hug, wanting reassurance and care, or pushing away what feels threatening and scary. But our little kids don’t know they’re in adult bodies, so they don’t realize those bodies have more power and impact. So they’re not pushing with the force of a toddler, but rather the force of a man.
Being a man is the greatest risk factor for experiencing violence or homicide. Three in four homicide victims are male. Yet collectively we have not organized around that risk the way other targeted communities do. It’s possible this is in part because men are also most likely perpetrators of violence—almost 80% of murderers are male. Most of us grow up in worlds where the threat or experience of violence is normalized.
As a closeted gay kid, I thought I was uniquely attuned to this—once I heard my friends, guys my age, making comments about “bringing a baseball bat to prom” because an openly gay classmate was planning to go with his boyfriend. But now I think that threat of violence extended to all boys and men who fell out of the narrow and confusing lines of acceptable male behavior. So being gay was obviously gay, but sometimes recycling is gay, or wearing nail polish—unless you’re a mixed martial arts fighter. Even without violence, there is the threat of violence.
Protecting myself from violence is so ingrained in me that I almost forget how much I think about it. When walking alone at night through dark places, I’ve learned to walk with upright posture, open senses, hands out and ready to respond. I’ve avoid looking at my phone, wearing headphones, anything to suggest I’m inattentive to my surroundings. I walk like I know where I’m going because I know appearing lost and confused makes me a target for predation. This has been so much in my mind that the times I have been stolen from I usually blame myself before I feel angry at anyone else. It’s my own fault! I knew better than to leave my backpack in the backseat where anyone cold see it. I knew I should’ve taken that expensive headlight off my bike when I locked it outside.
Confronting our own capacity for violence and relationship to force is a task I believe all men—really all humans—need to take on at some point in our lives, especially if we want to become powerful. Jordan Peterson, a Jungian-informed psychologist who offers guidance to young men and someone with whom I frequently and forcefully disagree, has said it thus: “[a man] should be a monster, and absolute monster, and then you should learn to control it.” When we disown our own violence, Peterson suggests, we may be naive and resentful of the ways others take advantage. Claiming and training our capacity for power and violence helps us to stand up for ourselves, set clear boundaries, and make moral choices. Instead of our capacity for violence leaking out in reactive ways—our little kids in adult suits lashing out—we know our power and use it on purpose.
Peterson and I would wholeheartedly disagree about a number of things—he would want me imprisoned for supporting transgender people access medical care—but here he is speaking of what is broadly understood to be “shadow work” in Western spiritual communities, drawing upon Carl Jung’s insights into the shadow as the parts of us that get disowned. Until we can turn toward, witness, and accept our anger and capacity for violence and cruelty, we have no real control over it. We are either useless in our fear of power, or we act out our power covertly and avoid taking responsibility for the harm we cause. Doing this shadow work includes facing the guilt and shame we feel over our capacity for violence, and facing the impulse to avoid that guilt and shame through inflating ourselves with ego-flattering stories of being a hero and valorizing violence.
Once I was working at a community mental health agency with clients who were on probation, corrections supervision, or otherwise had criminal charges. I loved this work and the clients and rarely felt concerned for my own safety. Clients may have been frustrated and angry with me, and a couple made scary-sounding threats, but there was always a sense of a line between us that would never be crossed.
Except one time when someone did. It wasn’t my client but someone who’d been discharged and came in crisis. We sat down and I re-enrolled them in services and set them up with appointments to get care, but the client was very difficult to engage. He kept getting off-task or making weird inappropriate comments. At one moment, he leaned in, reached his hand out, and slapped me on the cheek. It wasn’t hard enough to hurt me, but it was enough to sting. It was a deliberate intrusion. It was a test.
I leaned back and looked straight at him, soberly. “Do not touch me again.”
He raised his pale hands in feigned shock, clearly making fun of me and pretending he was so surprised by my response. I decided we’d accomplished all we could that day and told him it was time to go. We stood to leave, but he disregarded my direction and walked the other way, toward a staff door.
That’s when I felt scared, because I knew I was not in control of the situation. I had clients who had murdered people, and worst, but who respected my role and followed directions. This guy was unpredictable, clearly fed off my reactions, and I had no other moves. Fortunately another staff person was in that office, and together we guided the client to turn around and go out the clearly marked exit door, but I still had to go outside to give him his appointment card.
I remember it was an overcast Seattle afternoon, not cold or rainy, but grim. I handed him the card, relieved he wasn’t my client, and told him the next steps with some distance between us. Then he raised his hand and punched toward me as a feint, stopping before it made contact. My body remained still and I held eye contact with him. Something in my sensed that he wasn’t going to hit me, but if I flinched then it would escalate him. I held my stance, and we both walked away safe that day.
As a gay feminist, as a little kid growing up into an adult male suit, it didn’t really occur to me until my twenties that I might be part of the problem. I’d gone back to a high school friend’s wedding, feeling weird being around some of the jock guys I didn’t know in school. I’d viewed them suspiciously, as potential bullies and sources of violence, having not ever gotten the chance to get to know them and only going after my own fear, biases, and self-protection. I wanted to seem cool and together and not a loser anymore, but I was still making a mess out of my life and uncertain where to go with a career. But I ended up talking to some of those guys and started to really see that no one gave much of a shit about our old roles. They treated me like another guy, and it felt great.
I said hello to a woman friend of mine from school who’d worn this beautiful dress that exposed her shoulders. I put both hands on her shoulders and squeezed them in a familiar way. Moments later, I had this thought—“Would I have touched her like that if she were a man?”
The question hooked into my brain. What made me think that she wanted or appreciated that kind of touch? What did it mean that I would touch a woman in a friendly way that I’d never consider doing with a man? The only times I touched men were awkward hugs or sex. Friendly touch was not yet in my vocabulary of social connection. Mostly parts of me feared that a man would respond to that kind of touch with violence.
I started to realize I was walking through the world in an adult white man suit, and from the outside a stranger would experience me with the protections of mistrust and caution through which I viewed most men. Casual touch could no longer be innocent and thoughtless, it needed to happen in a relationship of consent and care. Years and years later, in my martial arts community, I now have male friends who do share that kind of friendly touch. It was strange and confusing to me at first, but completely straight men seem totally okay giving and receiving affectionate touches on the shoulder, rubbing each other’s backs, and hugs. Perhaps it’s because we’re facing the monsters within and now we have nothing to prove.
If we could sit together, and you were having your feelings that a woman would rather be in the woods with a bear than with a strange man, I would want to tell you I completely get it. I get how sincere is the desire to be a protector, how much we long to celebrate our good intentions, and how painful it is to be cast as a villain even if only by association. I get how those little kids inside of us only want to love and be loved and how painful it is to feel like we’re never enough, we’re never doing enough, or that we’re intrinsically monstrous.
I want us all to look in the mirror and invite every part of us to see the adult men we’ve become. I want those scared little kids to see that they now have an adult—they have you—whose job it is is to love and care for them, keep them safe, and help them find the places where they can belong and be loved. I want those wonderful fighters and fixers and figuring-out parts of us to see the strength and power of your body and mind, to cultivate those powers if it’s their will, and to know it’s not their job to fix the entire world. I want all of those parts to know it’s safe to allow others in your life to struggle, to make choices, to have feelings and opinions you dislike, but it’s not your job to make them different any more than it’s their job to make you different.
I want that permission to be okay exactly as you are, and to allow others to be okay as they are, to let you let yourself off the hook, so you can really listen to all the parts of you and make the choices that are right for the whole team. So you can know your heart and your own good intentions and you don’t have to change or fix the reality that some people will think you’re scary at first, or may be guarded around you because of your body. Letting their experiences be, without making yourself wrong, without making them wrong, is what allows them to trust you. Knowing you are capable of violence and not doing it is what makes you safe.
May 9, 2024
Slowing Down and the Wheel
I turn 42 today, on eclipse day, and it has been a strange year leading to this moment. Some practitioners who work with Tarot use a numerological procedure to identify the Major Arcana card that represents the core themes and lessons of the year. This year has been, for me, the Wheel of Fortune, which one of my teachers described as a time of “really high highs and really low lows.” Coming into this year with this perspective offered me great solace and grounding. Instead of clinging to one or the other, I settled into the acceptance of both, that pain would follow joy and eventually return to joy.
That is simply the way of things, whether one works hard or not, whether one is intentional and present or sleepwalks through life, there is no escaping cycles and no escaping pain and joy. And when that feels true, it is okay. Many of us have parts that do everything in their power to avoid pain or fix happiness in place. Many of us have parts that fear to relax and enjoy life out of concern that bad things will come if we let down our guard. Those parts are so loving, and work so hard, and it’s so tender because life is filled with hard things and lovely things no matter what.
The Wheel
In this past year, I had some lovely soaring personal achievements in completing a book for a larger publisher than I’ve worked with previously and success in my martial arts practice, which remains a surprising part of my life that I would never have imagined I could be any good at in the past. And in the past three months, we’ve had a lot of lows. We’ve had some sad and sudden losses at home. I had some new body changes that required medical intervention that set me back further than I’d expected.
Some associate the occult and astrological significance of the planet Jupiter with the Wheel of Fortune. Jupiter tends to make things a lot bigger and gives us a certain amount of swagger and bravado that can veer into overconfidence. What I also appreciate about Jupiter is there’s a certain amount of redemption whenever this planet is involved—even setbacks and suffering may have a quality of luck about them. Because I was laid out by surgery at the beginning of the year, I decided to return to my exercise routine really slowly and gradually, starting with light weights or bodyweight exercises.
As I did this, my awareness of my form in weightlifting deepened, along with the feedback in my body that told me when I was doing things badly. I’ve had this knee pain that has been growing over the past year and really began to demand attention last fall, but then the other stuff took precedence, and now I am back to the knee pain and discovering that all this time I’ve been compromising my squat and deadlift form and not letting my glutes and hamstrings do the work of stabilizing. Humbled, returning to basics, I am amazed both at how better form seems to be making great strides in resolving the knee issue, and I’m noticing greater stability that makes martial arts more enjoyable and life a lot easier.
Slowing Down
For the past three months, that phrase has been everywhere—in trainings I’m taking, in classes, and in the work of my book Slow Magic which does not yet have a release date but has a beautiful cover. As an Aries, slowing down is something I hate and desperately need. Often I conceal impatience by avoiding things that would bring it out, which leads to situations like progressive knee pain because instead of being with the discomfort of the weakness in my form, I just plow ahead and keep adding more weight. I want to get to the good stuff, but hurrying has problems.
- When we’re hurrying, we might cut corners that don’t seem to matter and then learn they actually mattered a lot and now you have to go back and undo a lot of work to redo it correctly.
- We might make decisions without talking to important stakeholders who will then oppose what we’re doing if only because they don’t know what the hell is going on and they’re impacted.
- Even if we do communicate, we might rush through in a way that doesn’t really let the other person process what we’re saying and talk through their needs and concerns, which—you guessed it—causes problems down the line.
In trauma therapy, we say that to go fast we need to go slow. That is true of much in life. When learning a new skill, when healing, when doing important work, slowing down lets us be more thorough and not overwhelm our systems with information and feedback. It is funny, of course, to have written an entire book about slowing down only to find myself learning even more about the importance of it. I can imagine some antagonist saying how I could write a book about something I’m still trying to do?
I often say that I suspect Mary J. Blige does not sing all those songs about loving yourself and setting aside the drama because she’s naturally good at those things. Buddhists don’t have meditation practices because their minds are already spacious and calm. All of us are dealing with our uniquely messy closets and learning, and relearning, and reminding ourselves of what helps us and who we want to be. When things come too easily to a person, they don’t really have a lot to offer to someone who is struggling. It’s only those who are struggling beside us, or have struggled longer than us, who can really relate to and help us understand our struggles.
This year I am turning toward Justice, a season I imagine will involve a lot of adapting the structures of my life and my relationships to accommodate all the changes of fortune the wheel has brought to my life. I am so grateful for those who share my life with me, and for the clients who entrust me with the responsibility of their care, and I am so grateful for all of my teachers.
April 8, 2024
I have been avoiding this.
I keep avoiding this—the blog, writing Internet things, self-expression.
Partially it’s because my writing energy has gone toward other projects.
The book I am working on is with the publisher and in the editing stage, and whenever I complete a major undertaking I find there’s a period of lostness, emptiness, and fallow creativity. I maintain a level of daily writing practice and the all-important social media self-promotion through making little contemplations every morning to post on my professional Instagram and Facebook. This has been a lovely practice of bringing together my therapist and spiritual selves—tuning into the planetary ruler of the day, listening to what it wants to “tell me,” and then creating a short contemplation that could easily scroll by someone’s feed and give them a moment of thought, connection, inspiration. It’s been a relief to hide a bit, revealing a tendency outside of myself rather than something within.
Partially it’s because I’ve been going through it since December on the personal level.
I am grieving some precious losses, regaining my strength in a body that is aging, navigating professional challenges. I am feeling more and more the weight of carrying an entire practice alone. I am overwhelmed by how much the conditions of my own country are changing so quickly and realizing that the dreams of my childhood were for a world that no longer exists. I am so blessed and privileged that it feels hard to complain about it. Parts of me get impatient with my own complaining. And yet when I go too long pretending I’m fine, a collapse is inevitable. So I must allow myself to complain and seek support. But to complain appropriately, to the people in my life who can support me, and not those whom I serve.
Partially, I have been avoiding this because I’ve been protecting my heart and that protection is making my heart cynical and shallow.
What I want to practice is an open, connected heart but still defended against danger and inhumanity. How that practice is showing up for me lately is to turn where I’m being led. If I want to go one direction but I’m being pushed in another, it works so much better to just let myself take the turn and go with the movement. This used to feel like some kind of weakness or sacrifice of will—I have to do it myself! And yet it seems just as often that turning where I’m led ends up introducing me to the opportunities I need. At the very least I’m not overwhelmed with struggle and able to remain clear, present, connected, soft.
Partially, I have been avoiding this because every time I sit to write I feel I am supposed to have a take on what is happening in the world.
I hear Sinead O’Connor singing, “These are dangerous days. / To say what you feel is to dig your own grave.” The past four years have done a number on my idealism and particularly on my sense of who I am and what role I play in the world. I burnt out on my white saviorism and fell into some cynical despair.
As someone who tends to affiliate with “politicized therapists” I have been in a time of re-reflecting how to be with politics in the therapy room.
I wouldn’t say the therapy room is or can be a space outside of politics, or depoliticized. And I feel so strongly that the therapy room is a space for us to be safe to explore every part of ourselves, and if there’s a strong political agenda in the room, that tends to shut down safety and exploration. So I feel more appreciative of the tradition of therapist as blank slate and conscious of the truth that it is impossible for me to be a truly blank slate. My parts of self are always with me in some capacity, carrying their unique blindspots and gifts, their perspectives of the world informed by my material conditions and history.
The challenge continues to be how to create opportunities for honest and courageous conversations in a way that allows for the emotional safety and care of my clients, whom I serve. Ongoing Internet discourse seems to be frustrated with the idea that the therapist is on the side of their clients, and probably those sharing those memes are imagining someone they’re really done with who’s ostensibly in therapy and not “getting” what they think the person should be “getting” and blaming the therapist for that.
And, sure. That’s always a problem. Maybe the therapist isn’t challenging the client on those issues and there are so many reasons that could be happening. The therapist may share that blind spot. The therapist may be wholly unaware of this problem because all we have to work with is what the client tells us. The therapist may be wholly aware of this problem and sensitive to the reality that coming at it with a direct confrontation could severely damage the relationship, and then the therapist has no leverage at all.
Sometimes it is wise to be patient, and wait, and wait until the client feels safe enough to begin to talk about a thing, and wait some more, and help them to be able to tolerate exploring their own ambivalence about their behavior, and help them to arrive at their own change. Sometimes it is wise to be direct and strike at the skillful moment of opportunity. There’s no law, no psychological test, no statistical model that gives us the knowledge of when and how this works. All we can do is be in the field of relationship, take risks, learn what happens, and use that information to guide future risks.
Here is where I’m coming to differentiate activism from therapy. Activism leans into strong, forceful declarations to get attention to their cause, take control of the narrative, and spur action. They have to state things in really strong, totalizing ways. Therapy leans into softness, curiosity, and the confusing terrain of nuance. We keep going deeper into the questions and exploring the roots of how things came to be framed in these terms. This distinction does not mean the two don’t coexist in the same body—there are activists with a therapeutic touch, and therapists who are activists. I draw this distinction to make sense of my own inner contradictions, my pulls to be aggressive and to be sensitive and nuanced.
So I will say what I feel I can say.
I have known and loved Jewish people my whole adult life, and I know that Jewish people in America are targets of anti-semitic words and actions, violence against synagogues, and bizarre and dehumanizing tropes. So many Jewish people in the US have friends or family in Israel, and so many Israeli people have horrific stories of witnessing or experiencing traumatic violence. It makes sense to me why there could be a longing in many Jewish and Israeli people for strong, ferocious protections, to hope for a land in which one could be safe from cultural and physical violence. What happened on October 7th was horrific by any measure, and it makes sense that a person from this perspective would see Hamas as nothing other than a clear and present danger that needs to be neutralized. It also does not make sense to me to speak of Israel as somehow an exceptionally evil or invalid state, when the Israeli state is doing no more or less than what my own country has done to make space for itself and safety and wealth for its citizens. Yet the USA is not spoken of as an “entity,” so I appreciate how that is anti-semitic.
I also know and support so many Jewish people who are critical of the actions of Israel, who see the state and military’s actions as genocidal and a tremendous overreach, who feel pinched between their family’s support of Israel, attacks on their own Jewish identity for being critical of Israel, anti-semitic attacks for being Jewish or being insufficiently critical of Israel in the eyes of largely non-Jewish left-wing people. It makes no sense to me to speak of “white supremacy” in regard to Jewish identity. Jewish people are of many racial lineages, and Jewishness itself has always been sort of white when it’s convenient for white people to consider them white, and then excluded from whiteness when there’s tension and upheaval.
I also feel so much for the Palestinian people whose lives are clearly treated as less valuable than those of Israeli people. The blockade, the bombings, the killing of thousands of non-fighting Palestinians for the sake of trying to get hundreds of combatants is horrifying. The slow encroachment of territory and displacement of those who lived there before is never going to be welcomed with understanding and compliance. These are the conditions that breed more terrorism. Netanyahu’s government has apparently supported Hamas as a convenient enemy to align with his political goals, much as the USA has for various terrorist groups we’ve ended up fighting over the decades. How on earth could one blame Palestinian people for being angry when their political and economic autonomy is curtailed and stripped? They are also deserving of safety, of autonomy, of a state that has their back—if any of us are “entitled to a state.”
I am located outside of all of these positions, someone who is a witness but also culpable because my taxes are funding what is happening. So I feel these tensions of not wanting to get into a mess while also being unable to step out of it. All of these tensions make sense and the people of that land need to find the resolutions that can restore peace. What makes sense to me today is to support a ceasefire, the USA ceasing to provide armaments to the world, and focusing any US intervention on humanitarian aid.
So now I have spoken all the things I’ve avoided, and I’m curious what will come next.
April 1, 2024
Variation on a Theme by Marianne Williamson
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”
― Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of “A Course in Miracles”
Our deepest fear is not that we are powerful beyond measure. Our deepest fear is that we are solely burdened with the responsibility to make life work. It is the endless feeling of inadequacy, of not doing enough, of failing in some core way to be big and bright and bold enough that frightens us. We ask ourselves, ‘When is it enough? What is wrong with a quiet walk and hours spent admiring the variations of bark on a tree, its subtle colorations and textures?’ Actually, who told you that accomplishment was your purpose on earth? You are God experiencing herself in the fullness of her being, through your unique body. Your suffocating your soul for the sake of money or attention, reputation or influence does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about constantly striving to be brighter than your neighbor, to be an influencer, to feign superiority of knowledge or insight over someone whose life you could never understand. We are all meant to be kindred, each fulfilling our unique niche in the ecosystem of life. We were born to delight in the body of God who is our mother and the ground of our being. We alone are not meant to save the world; it is everyone’s job to do our little part. And as we let go of the need to dominate at all costs, we stop suffocating everyone else and allow them to breathe for once. As we stop demonizing our fear and accept it as one of many beautiful sensations keeping us vital on this beautiful world, our presence invites the presence of others.
February 16, 2024
Neptune Square
It’s like spending your entire life on a mountain, only there’s no nice professionally graded pathway dug in for you, it’s mostly a cliff wall and below so much distance inviting you to fall for minutes before the earth breaks and collects your body. You press your back along the rock wall and inch, inch, inch cross the narrowest outcropping of rock which is all you have for stability. You know—or you believe so hard you’ve convinced yourself it’s a knowing—that if you keep going long enough and don’t fall you’ll find a plateau, a nice grassy area with fresh water and enough to eat, and you’ll be able to rest and maybe even live, but until then you have to cling and keep surviving.
But days and days exhaust you with effort. For many moments you wonder if there’s relief in letting it go and being done with it. You doubt there’s a plateau at all. Who told you there would be one? Why did you believe it? But you have to believe it.
And then finally the effort tenderizes you to softness. It’s not so much a giving up as it is almost an intuition, now is the time to let go, and if you ignore it then your foot finds a crack to stumble upon and spill you into the abyss. Only you’re not falling. A lift of warm air keeps you aloft.
You would imagine this to be a wonder, a delight, a rejoicing, but all you know at first is bitter resentment. How could I have been so wrong all this time? How have I wasted these years in this endless fucking effort and terror when all I needed to do was the one thing I worked so hard not to do?
Was it a mistake? You’ve seen people fall. You’ve seen the horrors they become from their slippage. What if the chasm was only giving back what you gave to it—trading horror to terror, giving release to surrender? Perhaps you were a fruit clinging to the branch. Plucked too soon would have been a tragedy. You needed that joining so your tree could feed you until you’d ripened and could let that connection delicately snap so you could fall, easily, easily, into the hands of sky. Another birth, a new life in an old world, a new self in an old body. Everything is new.
February 6, 2024
Giving it 60%
This has not been an easy month.
Not the worst month ever, and nothing I need to share publicly, but my body went through some stuff that required a lot of deep rest and more gradual return to activity than I’d expected. In the month prior, I’d committed to returning to in-person services, and spent several days acquiring furniture for the office, setting it up, and trying to prepare the ground for myself to focus on rest and recovery and then easily transition to the office. I have a part that works so hard to give future me a break, and when future me ends up struggling anyway, this part of me takes it personally.
Other challenging things decided to occur that were not part of the plan. My recovery was not so swift or complete as I’d expected. The doctor I saw said I had “no physical limitations” and could go back to normal activity, but did not clarify what normal activity was, only to add, “obviously listen to your body and use common sense.” As someone who really, really craves clear explicit expectations, this threw me into confusion. What is common sense? Nurses, friends, and family members all had a range of opinions as to how I should be doing my recovery, how long I should wait before going back to the gym or martial arts.
Earlier in life, I was so afraid of hurting myself or making injuries worse that I tended to over-rest and avoid exercise and effort when I thought something was happening. Later, frustrated with all that lost time, I pushEd myself to keep exercising too quickly after injuries and illnesses. I learned that a certain amount of movement is helpful toward healing more quickly, while trying to do the same exercise you did at prime health was a quick route to creating more injuries and setbacks.
Whatever sense I could derive—I don’t know if it’s common—is boiled down in what the doctor said: listen to my body. The historical problem was that I was not fluent in my body’s language and needed a number of good and bad experiences to gain a more robust vocabulary. The most definitive thing I can say is that my body needs both movement and rest in varying proportions. Even immediately after I went through the stuff, I was advised to do a little walking around to help my body clear whatever gas they used to inflate my innards and make room for their little surgery machine. But walking for five minutes was pretty agonizing, and I was happy to rest shortly after.
What I found helped the most was to do a little bit, rest, and then try doing a little bit more. For the first week, I did little other than rest on the couch, catch up on all the fever dream horror movies I’d missed (laughing hurt too much), and do little laps around the living room. For the second week, I started doing half hour walks around the block, especially to and from the office.
By the third week, I felt like I could do more stuff but didn’t want to overdo it. My dojo had a special class memorializing the unexpected loss of one of our community, and that felt like something I could attend and just do what I could and sit out what I couldn’t. To my surprise, I could do a lot more than I expected, without pain. To my other surprise, there were things my body seemed to struggle with that were easy before. I’d get stuck in weird parts of the movement that were formerly smooth, and I couldn’t tell why I was stuck.
What worried me most was getting treated like a black belt and thrown around the way my dog shakes his toys. Usually that’s fun, but I wanted to ease into it more. My dojo is very open about modifying practices based on injuries and body needs but I couldn’t figure out a way to communicate what I needed other than, “I’m at 60%.”
It turned out, this was extremely effective. Most people heard this and slowed down for me until we found a speed and intensity that worked. I couldn’t tell you exactly what 60% looks like, and no one asked for specifics, but it was enough of a signal to say—let’s not be super intense, but I do want a workout. After a week, I feel I’ve upgraded to 66.6%, which is two-thirds, but somehow percentages feel more intuitive in these conversations.
60% is beautiful because it is effort, but the slowness and gentleness has allowed me to really inhabit and explore the movements. We are still offering enough energy to each other for practice, but I could take time feeling through those places where I got stuck and sense into how the technique wants to unfold. Then I could go and rest, and feel my body integrating the effort that pushed its edges, but not to injury. This feels like a practice I want to remember in future setbacks. Not to force myself back to even 80%, but to find the percentage that feels like effort and stay there, then rest, then see if I can do a little more.
January 29, 2024
The serpents of our lesser nature.
The other night, I had a dream in which a group of us discussed a quote about “the serpents of our lesser nature.” The group hosted diverse viewpoints and one participant was a strident, cheerful Christian who spoke as though we were already in full agreement with her. I raised the point that the serpent was linked to both Jesus and Satan in the Christian tradition, and she laughed at me as though I was the most silly, ignorant person alive for coming to that notion.
This sparked a fierce anger that followed me into my waking life, whereupon I got out of bed to google research and confirm that what I said was true before I brushed my teeth. Thus I was reminded that Jesus, in John 3:14, likens himself to the serpent statue Moses lifted up to heal the Israelites. This led me to reread the story told in Numbers, and it is intriguing: it begins with the Israelites wandering the desert, following the leadership of Moses and their god. The wanderers complain of their suffering, the bad food, the lack of water, and this is what spurs their god to send the venomous serpents who killed many with their bites. Then the Israelites repent and recognize they’ve sinned against their god. Moses prays on their behalf, and god gives him the instructions to create the brazen serpent so that whosoever is bitten will survive the bite.
The serpent is thus venomous and medicinal. It kills and it heals. On its belly, it crawls on the surface of the earth engaged in the survival necessary for all animals with cunning and wisdom. Put on a pole and lifted up, it becomes a medicine, as in the staff of Asclepius. This is a common religious practice that shows up in all kinds of traditions: the figure who causes suffering turned into the protector against, and healer of, that suffering. Who better? In its original sense, a “hierarchy” is the arrangement of qualities by their proximity to divine. Our earthly survival would be lower, or perhaps lesser, than what is more connected to the divine source of things.
In the story from Numbers, I see so many serpents of lesser nature. The text suggests that the Israelites recognized their complaining and bitterness as a sin that incurred this punishment. If Moses had called me in to do therapeutic mediation between God and the Israelites, I would likely point out that it makes sense for a group that just escaped slavery to feel ambivalent about these conditions. After taking great risks and sacrificing much to escape, it might feel like things are worse in the desert with bad food and little water. I might encourage God to explore what about their complaints bothered him so much, and see if he could communicate his needs with a boundary instead of venomous snakes.
Yet it makes more sense to read this story like it is itself a dream, with the snakes a manifestation of the wanderers’ discontent. The venom might be akin to the emotional poison they inject into each other with their frustrations and resentments about an admittedly harsh and painful fight for bare survival. What’s intriguing is that when the Israelites repent, they ask Moses to pray for the removal of the snakes, but God does not fulfill that request. Instead, Moses is given instructions to make a medicine that instead heals those bitten by the snakes. There is no undoing, only transmutation. The poison itself may be part of the medicine.
A Jungian reading would see this at this as the mythological enactment of a psychological process by which the lesser serpent becomes the greater serpent. First we must witness the harm done from reactivity—when we lashed out because we felt scared, or weak, or small, or vulnerable. Then we transform that lashing out into the symbol of its healing, lifting it up to be witnessed and offered to those who offended us. We let everyone know that we see what happened, what transmitted the harm, and what can restore us back into health.
Yet this does not complete the process the dream is trying to enact in me. Dreams do not tell you what you already know, they point to what you need to recognize. In my own soul, I begrudgingly must wonder if the serpent of my lesser nature might the anger that motivated me to google Bible stories before my morning coffee, then wish I could go back to sleep to tell off that lady in my dream. As hard as it may be to believe, I think some folks might question whether that is a reasonable use of one’s precious life force. Being belittled, mocked, or thought stupid has been a big button in my life—it riles up all my protectors in a fruitless battle to demand to be taken seriously.
Which suggests that chipper, mocking Christian woman was herself another serpent of my lesser nature. For I can see her venom within me at my lowest points in life, when self-righteousness and sneering intellectual superiority sneak out to give my wounded ego a band-aid. Even when I think I’m calmly rising above a disagreement, the fangs come out. “I’m not going to argue about this,” I’ll say like an exhausted reasonable adult, immediately following it with a parting jab or argument that shows I am arguing about it. It’s dishonest. To name these vulnerabilities feels like giving a weapon to those who now know how to rile me up. Yet now here they are, woven to this pole, so I can lift them up as medicine.
December 6, 2023
Running toward and away from connection.
When I think of belonging, it is like two dogs tied together wanting to run in opposite directions. One dog wants so desperately to belong to a pack it would run toward whatever looks welcoming. The other is so suspicious of groups that it mistrusts and wants to flee anyone whose agenda seems suspect—and to this dog, most agendas are suspect. Yet in running away from each other, the tether binding them both ties tight, and they falter in their missions, and they turn and attack each other in their longings to be free to seek what they desire.
In The Hidden Life of Trees, Peter Wohlleben talks about the difference between trees deeply rooted in an established forest versus the “city kids.” In the forest, the trees connect with each other through root, leaf, and an extensive mycelial network that helps them to know about the other trees. Trees rich in resources can send nutrients and support to those having a rougher season. But urban trees are unsupported and unconstrained. They grow too quickly and die sooner. They cannot help each other because their roots do not connect.
One of the manifestations of the war of belonging within me was intense anxiety and social pressure. When interacting with people I didn’t know, I was afraid to take any risks because I didn’t know the rules and expectations. I was afraid of alienating them by crossing a line I didn’t know about, so I learned to be quiet and fade into the background until I had a sense of the culture. If people were too warm, I backed away. When making small-talk, I would shut down and get overwhelmed with self-critique about how stupid I sounded, or how I didn’t know what next to say.
The isolation of COVID enacted a strange alchemy. One thing I learned was how much I needed human connection, though I deeply enjoy my alone time. When I re-emerged into making small talk with other people, I realized it was so much easier than I’d thought. All you do is talk about stuff. If they’re not interested in that stuff you talk about other stuff. It doesn’t even matter what stuff you talk about because the whole point is just to connect and build rapport. I thought I had to be interesting, or witty, or profound, and that made it much harder to connect and probably pushed people away who read my hesitation as aloofness rather than a desperate desire to figure out how to connect.
The other side of that, was realizing that when I felt the conversation was boring or foundering, it wasn’t all on me. That’s a two way problem. The other person isn’t showing up with presence or authenticity. They’re not investing energy into the connection, perhaps mirroring the lack of energy on my side, or perhaps for other reasons. I you take the risk to be honest and connect, and they choose to hide and obfuscate, there’s not much else you can do about them. The real question becomes how much you want to invest in this connection.
Along with this liberating new perspective on small-talk came the extension toward belonging. What if I just belonged because I’m here? What if belonging wasn’t something to run toward or away from but something just to be in and cultivate in the connections that really work for me?
Focusing on those connections has been deeply restorative and important, and after a time I find myself ready to expand again. I start to see that when you only surround yourself with people who validate and love you, the rest of the world looks really scary. That begins to have diminishing returns. We lose some of our hardiness and practice in the face of adversity. Supportive relationships should feel like a safe harbor that will always be there to welcome us as we return from our adventures, to regroup and relax. But if we never leave, it starts to feel stale. We perhaps begin to find little faults in the harbor or fixate on the little moments of invalidation and unsafety that are inevitable in human communication.
But that’s what belonging brings us. A harbor. A safety net. A crew that has our back. A place we can tend and nurture, and a place from which we can launch and return. And it’s made of these little moments of connecting, of feeling our ruptures and risking reconnection, or finding the people and places safe enough for us to risk vulnerability. For so long I thought community was something that had to be made through laborious work with just the right people, just the right rules, the right shared values. But rules and work are the head. Connection comes from the heart. The most perfect guidelines and group agreements fail when the heart is not engaged. It’s worth, for a time, dropping the expectations and finding how the heart wants to connect today.
November 28, 2023
Words get in the way.
Before the pandemic, I had my first ritual psychedelic experiences in a shared, facilitated space. That first experience was intriguing—I had the sense of being a larger spiritual consciousness that was aware of it temporarily living the body and life of this human being. In that sense of expansion, I felt a sense of how much experience there is in experience, how much sensation and information there is in every moment. And a sense that the words I spoke to try to communicate it felt wholly inadequate to the task. There were these thoughts that felt incredibly profound and beautiful but when I tried to write them down, I was disappointed. The words were nothing like the thoughts.
Since then, I’ve felt disenchanted with language, which is a hard problem for someone who loves reading and writing. In my younger days, language had a talismanic, magical power. A beautifully written poem or song lyric seemed to resonate with its own spirit. I’d post them where I could see every day, quoted them on my embarrassing personal blogs, and held them up as these incredibly beautiful pieces of magic.
Occasionally there is a piece of writing that strikes me with that beauty, but so much of the content that I read every day begins to blur into this meaningless Orwellian duckspeak, or obfuscating rhetoric. It is the fate of every revolutionary concept to be laden with more and more meanings and used beyond the bounds of its original formulation, until it comes to represent everything and nothing. One can almost predict the litany of words a writer is about to apply as though they are self-explanatory.
Once I was talking to a friend about a problem I was having, and I started with, “I know I’m privileged, but—” and the friend, who was less privileged, stopped me. “You know you don’t have to say that.” And I wondered why I felt like I did. I joked, “I feel like it’s a ward against cancellation.” The more I thought about it, the more true it felt. It didn’t add to the conversation or change my privilege in a meaningful way, it felt like a superstitious act, like picking up a penny.
When I started working as a therapist, I was in trainings where we were encouraged not to use psychological jargon in our practice and whenever possible to use the client voice in our notes. The thought was, however you the client speaks about your problems has far more use and aliveness than our clinical language. Yet these days clinical jargon has become so popularized that my clients use it more than I do in a session.
When the clinical concepts give them a us to hold our struggles at a distance and look at them, it’s useful. What becomes unuseful is when our language compresses a wealth of information and feeling within one or two keywords that we assume all of us understand in the same way, when we do not. Sometimes the clinical language becomes our way of trying to race over treacherous ground. If we had to stop and really talk about what was happening and how we feel about it, we’d be overwhelmed.
As a therapist, I often stop my clients and ask them to do slow down and walk through the treacherous ground. When they label someone in their life a narcissist, I want them to explain to me what that means to them—not because I don’t believe them. Often, when I hear the story, I agree. But because it’s the story that connects us. Your efforts to put your experience into your own words is what brings suffering out of the undifferentiated mass of pain into something we can see and heal.
On an aesthetic level, I do not like most clinical language and jargon. I do not like a lot of the words we’ve turned into identities because they are Latinate and carry an aura of authority. I do not like encoding our pain and heartbreak within the language of science and psychiatry. To me this trend seems part of the ongoing struggle of the analytical mind to tame and dominate the wild vitality of the sensuous soul. I want them to partner with each other and support each other in being.
I use diagnoses, because I must, because that is my training and the tradition in which I practice, and because that is the prevailing norm of our healthcare system. But a diagnosis does not heal. It is the foam on the surface of the ocean. Healing draws us deeper into the dark ocean, to know the unspeakable velocities of emotion, and to come back with new words for old stories, words that may transform our worst pains into a source of vitality and strength.
September 8, 2023
An Inventory of Dead and Living Language
Lately I have been taking inventory of my beliefs, my ideals, and my guiding philosophies. One focus of reflection is language that once felt vital and inspiring but now feels dead, or at least murky. Words like “health,” “liberation,” and “manifestation,” once felt so vibrant. After years of repetition, mission creep, and marketing campaigns, I no longer know what they mean to me.
All of these leaves grow from a living tree, and my hope is to find the vitality at the source of the tree. At times I doubt there is a tree at all. At other times, I feel the tree with such vitality and urgency that it sends me back out into the world fighting and laughing. But I can confuse the leaves with the tree, which becomes problematic when the leaves grow dry. Are they shriveled dry leaves ready to be shed, or are they simply needing more light and water to be renewed?
Health and Wellness
These words feel increasingly like knives, like “shoulds.” They are judgment words pointed to promote a political or marketing agenda. There’s no coherent philosophy or objective measure to use in assessing health. A culture war, rather, rages around definitions of health. Is it healthy to take pills or supplements? To be vaccinated or to drink your own urine? What attitudes and behaviors are healthy? Is it healthy to eat a high-fat diet or a carb-heavy diet?
The etymological root of “health” is wholeness, making it a synonym for integrity. These days I think “health” is measurable by our values, goals, and behavior. We can be healthy with chronic disease, if we accept the disease and what must be done to live as close as possible to the life we want. We can be healthy in accepting our limitations and giving up the life we thought we wanted. We can be healthy in working to be less limited. But that’s a very psychotherapist-y view of health.
Manifestation
Once this word conveyed a world of magic: to manifest something that before did not exist. We could manifest spirits, books, special objects, relationships. These days, I mostly see the word on social media advertisements about manifesting lots of money or markers of success and status. It’s implicitly I-centered, as though the one who makes manifest is the elevated one who does things to the world to get manifestations. In that realm of thinking, the elevated individual, lies this increasingly disturbing rhetoric about other people being “bots” or “NPCs” with no subjectivity of their own.
What feels vibrant in the term is the sense of participating in the world and being in relationship with larger forces. I’ve never loved the term “co-create” though the concept is useful—it’s just a word that doesn’t feel flowing to say or write. Yet it’s approaching what I think is true. Whatever is manifested arises from a field of relationships in which you are only one ingredient. To make a beautiful wooden sculpture manifest, I could have the money to buy it—that’s the easy way—or the blade and the skills to carve one from good wood. But I don’t create the sturdy branch from which I carve the sculpture—that was manifested by the tree. And I don’t possess the spirit that inspired me to discover the sculpture within the branch, that emerges in a flash from beyond, or from the dance of skill, blade, and wood.
Liberation
When I first learned about liberation theology movements in high school, the word “liberation” had so much edge and potency. Using the teachings of Jesus Christ to validate direct action and the resistance of political violence, disenfranchisement, and oppression. It’s become a central word in my spiritual practice, comparable to “enlightenment” in its expression of a state of spiritual realization that comes from diligent work.
Yet these days the word feels not so much dead as murky and conflicted. What warrants the word? Is it middle class white liberal self-serving to use the word “liberation” for my own spiritual and therapeutic practice? Does it diminish those fiercer forms of liberation?
When I think of liberation, I think of consciousness and agency. We are laden with cultural conditioning, habit, political oppression, and economic exploitation. All of these, to very different intensities, encourage us to live quiet, unconsidered, asleep lives of bare survival. Bringing the light of awareness into this domains, waking up to their realities, and seeing the potential within that has been compromised by these forces makes the work of liberation possible. What feels liberatory is having more power, more choice, the will and capacity to influence the conditions of our lives according to our personal and collective wills.
Quitting nicotine use could be a smaller liberatory act. It requires looking at my conditioning and habit and creating a space of awareness that makes choice possible. It divests my energy and money from the people who profit off my actions and makes it available for whatever else I wish to do. Going on strike seems a bigger liberatory act in demonstrating the power of the group and using it to set the terms of your labor. The work of creating autonomous spaces within oppressive regimes would be a much larger kind of liberation.
Aliveness and Vitality
These words feel the most fresh and intriguing. Aliveness and vitality convey a subjective feeling of being in the world that is a step beyond awareness. For a long time, my work on awareness and consciousness was in the employ of scared parts of me that resisted aliveness. One of my counseling mentors used the word “aliveness” for one of her consult groups, and then I began practicing Aikido, where we occasionally speak of the aliveness in our practice. The word kindled a fire within me and scared me. Being alive is quite vulnerable. You have so much at stake and so much to lose that’s not hidden behind veils of distraction and numbness.
But also it makes life so much sweeter, so much more satisfying, and in a paradoxical way it makes life easier to lose. What I notice is those who are most afraid of death also tend to avoid aliveness. The fear of losing everything is so great that they avoid having anything worth losing. Yet the people who seem most alive to me take in more nourishment, and seem to have an easier time accepting the little and larger deaths that come with living. Losing is less scary because there’s a confidence that they can get more of what they need. Losing is less scary because they’ve delighted in eating as much of the apple as they could, and the rest is a gift to the earth.
August 3, 2023