In the culture of the United States of America, we have internalized a belief that to work is a moral virtue, and those who do not work are deficient in morality unless they have a reason considered acceptable by the dominant culture, such as retirement or a disability incurred by accident or in the course of doing one’s job. At the same time, we love and embrace technological advancements that increasingly render the kinds of work available to us obsolete while outsourcing other forms of labor, narrowing the field of work opportunities to tech fields, service labor, or middle management. We once had a vision of the future in which machines did most of the labor for us, freeing us up for family, leisure, creativity, research, passion, or contemplative pursuits. Instead we demean people who value those things over work and productivity as lazy or immoral and, on the average, have made ourselves busier than ever, more distracted, hustling harder and harder to do what Professor David Graber calls “Bullshit Jobs.”
The value of a person is intrinsic, it does not need to be justified by measurements according to use, money, productivity, or social worth.
Rivers, mountains, forests, and animals might also be considered persons with intrinsic value.
If we start with this foundation, then perhaps our economics and styles of relationship will shift. We no longer have the green light to exploit and pollute wherever we feel like it. We act with the knowledge that our actions cause harm to other beings—it’s unavoidable, it is a part of being a living creature–but as conscious beings we are accountable to the damage we cause. We cannot treat each other as objects to be used and thrown away. We cannot allow ourselves to be treated as objects to be used and thrown away.
by Missiondolores
Depression, despair, and anxiety might be telling you that the way you’re living your life isn’t lining up with your deepest values. Your anger might be telling you there is real injustice that you want to push against, though you might not recognize exactly where it is at first.
Letting yourself be bled to death and postponing the activities that give your life meaning is not a moral act, even if done for ostensibly noble reasons.
We can have lives of loving responsibility to those we care about while also following the truth of the heart. The trick is to give up our ideas about what these things are supposed to look like. The mind’s predictions are at best weather predictions–helpful for planning purposes, but then you might as well throw them away. If you’re out in the rain but insisting that it was supposed to be a sunny day, you’re not allowing yourself to be responsive to what is happening. You lose the chance to stay dry or simply enjoy the rain.
Guilt and shame are great for social control but terrible for growth and intimacy. When I’m feeling shamed by someone else, then usually I feel angry, defensive, or start wallowing in self-pity and self-abasement. I rarely think, “Oh, that’s a good point, I’ll try to change my behavior.”
I love listening, and I am still learning how to do it. Listening is the core of my practice and the seed of my growth. Listening is the wellspring from which so many rich insights and contributions flow. Listening invites a softness of awareness and self. To listen, I first acknowledge that there is a reality that I perceive through my senses that exists outside of me, and to understand and connect with this reality I need to allow space around my opinions and beliefs for new information.
When I think of listening, I think more broadly than simply receiving auditory data. The inner mechanisms by which I make sense of the data is also part of listening. The physical presence of the person speaking is a facet of this listening, what their bodies are doing or not doing. Watching their gestures and nonverbal communcation is a facet of listening. Perhaps I am speaking of something more broad and inclusive than listening, because at times seeing and feeling are facets of this listening. Perhaps I mean observing, but observing often has this connotation of being clinical and removed from the situation, even though we now understand that the observer and the observed affect each other.
Francis of Assissi, by Eugenio Hansen
I like listening to things that are not human. The wind, the feeling of sadness that wells up within me at surprising times, the grunting-squealing sounds my dogs make. When I allow myself to pay attention to these things, I am often surprised by their complexity of sound and the depth of information received. When I am listening, my intuition organizes the sensations and providing some insight or interpretation that has some truth value. To access this truth requires being in relationship, to remember that what “I think” is not the sole determinant of truth.
So much fails when I take my perceptions and beliefs as true and listen only for what corroborates these things. When I listen in this way, I’m less likely to learn, less likely to connect. I may become defensive or combative, pushing back against information that challenges what I think. I mis-hear things and do not doubt my experience. I hear Taylor Swift singing about lonely Starbucks lovers and create a whole story about what I think her song is, until I learn those were not her lyrics at all. Or I try to listen to someone in pain and, through my discomfort and perhaps well-meaning intention to connect, I assume that I’ve shared their pain. So I jump on the conversation, take their language, say “Oh the same thing happened to me, this is how I dealt with it.” When I listen in these ways, I cause alienation and hurt to others. I respond as though my beliefs are the truth and dismiss or overlook what the other person is trying to share with me. I become more occupied with being right than connecting.
I once thought that the beginning of anger was the end of listening, but I was doing a disservice to anger. Even with conflict, there can be listening to what in me feels angry, what needs care, justice, or a boundary; and being open to the anger of others in the situation. It’s harder for me to stay with listening when there is anger, but if I feel safe then I can re-engage. I can offer my point of view firmly so that we can have a clear conversation, we can know what is at stake for each other and perhaps better understand why we’re disagreeing. So often I listen to arguments between people and think that on some level they are in agreement, but there is some difference in language or emotional quality that causes each to think the other is in conflict.
I am still learning how to listen. I often forget. I often retreat to what feels known because part of me thinks I’m not ready to learn something new. Some part of me grows weary of openness and wants to simply react. I am listening to that, too. I am doing my best to notice when I’ve stopped listening, take a breath, and try to hear something new.
Revolutionaries are sexier than revolutions. We know their images, their hand-selected quotes, the steady curation of image that comes particularly when the revolutionary and their revolution is no longer a threat to the modern-day. Though their ideas and images continue to live, the dominant culture tends to take what is most palatable and discard the rest—unless the revolutionary serves a better purpose as the villain, in which case the culture takes what is most disturbing and elides the pointed critique.
Parthenon, by Thermos
There’s something magnetic about the marriage of the idealized vision and deep, transformative passion. The eyes inspire love or hatred, devotion or utter opposition. That depth of passion creeps through all that is joyous and heavy, loving and ferocious, creeping into the most crooked and unsettling parts of the human heart and brings it into service of the grand vision, the dream of a better society, a better life, a more egalitarian world. With this ferocity of dedication, all manner of ills suddenly seem all too easy to rationalize and use. Intoxicated by this passion, we see revolutions that become even more repressive than the tyrannies overthrown—the suppression of religion, free thought, the removal of liberties and “decadent” cultures.
When faced with the possibility of change, often the emotional parts of us that want safety and stability will push back hard, to clamp down, to become ferocious and punitive. Our systems of protection, feeling under attack, permit themselves to push back harder, crack down more fiercely, take on heavier firepower. Suddenly a simple disagreement becomes an ideological battle in which lines must be drawn and people must swear allegiance. We forget that our ideals are always and ever imaginary visions to which we aspire and cannot be effective laws to rule a species so diverse and contentious as humanity. Something will always rebel under the yoke of such legislation.
The heart of fervor could also allow room for the heart of deep love and compassion for the beauty and weakness of fellow humans. When this heart comes into contact with pure intellectual vision, those sterile guidelines can begin to relax. Instead of demanding our fellow humans adhere to a standard of morality that is devoid of humanity, we can bring those grand visions and ideals into an experimental practice. We can strive for equality while recognizing the inescapable tendency toward hierarchy. We can admit that our new ways of thinking and acting must by necessity overturn someone else’s world, a world that to them was perfectly suited to their nature—or at the very least, their nature had come to fit the world. We can recognize the distress of the privileged when it arises to meet the changes we push to see in our lives, our relationships, our civic communities. Change is coming, and for some it will be painful and arduous, while others might find themselves more free, more empowered.
A certain amount of social grace is useful: the ability to make small talk, to build connections between others, to find points of commonality and bring them together. We need people who knit us together as much as we need people willing to confront what is unspoken or unjust in community. We need those who quietly take part, finding a place among the throng, offering a simple contribution that makes sound the greater whole. As much as we love paying attention to the famous, the celebrity, the larger-than-life, it would be exhausting and unworkable if every person we met burned with the same fire.
Even still, we might feel some longing to stick out in some way, to be seen as divine even if only by one person. We might have some need or want that demands attention. A feeling of urgency arises, demanding action. “This matters to me, and it should matter to us all!” But the mind responds with a quickness, providing hundreds of completely reasonable arguments about why we should keep this to ourselves, why expressing it could disrupt the group and our place within it, why this is not the attention we really want.
Chumash Sun-Child-Adult, color-enhanced photo by Millennium Twain
Underneath these numbing arguments is the anxiety that comes when the instinct to act meets with inhibition. This anxiety says that if I do the thing I really want to do, everything will change and I don’t know if I’ll be able to manage the changes well. Maybe things will change in a way I like, but I cannot guarantee it. The mind thinks that offering these soothing reasons will be enough to convince our wants and needs to lay down quietly and go back to sleep, but these needs and wants are like insistent young children. They do not understand reason, they only understand their urges.
If we do not allow ourselves to admit to our desire for attention, we find ways to push away and undermine the efforts people do make to recognize and praise us. We get uncomfortable, shy, awkward, or put ourselves down. We make the person attempting to praise us uncomfortable or wrong.
When this want to express and be seen gets repeatedly ignored, they’ll begin to act out in ways that cause more problems than possibly would have happened in the first place. Instead of graciously accepting the attention we receive, we might become resentful and toxic toward those who naturally receive attention and praise. We might gossip, destructively criticize, or undermine those people who seem “too good for themselves.” We might try to get attention by completing negating ourselves, martyring ourselves in the hopes that if we suffer enough someone will finally see it and pull us out. We might cling to our problems and magnify them with the energy that we could have spent creatively.
What wants attention today? What today feels in conflict within the self? What in the mind is limiting the ability to take action? How do our impulsive behaviors undermine the ways we think we want to carry ourselves?
At times, something in the self grows wary of revolution. Even when one feels the way things are do not work, the current system of self-management or social management are harmful to well-being, there is still a fear of what will happen in the gap between the old and new systems. Revolutions are rarely without cost, and the cost is felt for all. Huge moments of change open up possibility and free a chaotic kind of energy that cannot be easily tamed and directed. Indeed, this energy is available to all, and might run counter to one’s intentions.
A part clings fast to comfort and stillness. When this part is not aligned with the change at hand, it saps the energy and will one needs to bring forth the change. We grow bored and resentful at our jobs and dream of a life of radical independence, but when the time comes to take the step, we look at our lives and wonder, “How will I pay for all this? What if I lose the comforts I have? What if what happens next is worse?” But if instead we denying this need to stop, to be still, we tear the roots of the self and distress the entire organism.
Der Stier, by Franz Mark
This stillness provides space for the imagination, giving it room to root into the soil and experience the change needed to bring vision into manifestation. Instead of narrowing our focus to a rigid view of what we think should happen, stillness brings a broadness and softness that helps us to adapt without losing the core of our vision.
This need for comfort pushes against the desire for radical change. We need a place for stillness, a place where we can rest and receive pleasure. Instead of pushing this away, how can we include this in the life and world we are attempting to create?
Many goddesses of love and pleasure are also known as goddesses of war: Freya, Aphrodite, Ishtar. Is love and pleasure included in the change we want to enact? Are the animal needs of our bodies given due honor, or are they shamed and suppressed? Even a vow of abstinence must allow space for the energy of craving and lust, else those urges sneak out in unexpected and unfortunate ways. Denial of the needs and wants of the body is a poor foundation for a revolution.
Our bodies and instincts offer power to the vision. When aligned to a sense of purpose, the body can tolerate incredible adversity and deprivation, but it cannot escape its own basic needs. Instead of attempting to assert “mind over matter,” bring the mind into the body. Feel your creatureliness, your pleasures and pains. Invite your mind to truly know and inhabit the body. Breathe into the places of tension and resistance, letting yourself feel what is happening without commentary from the mind. Exhale, allowing that tension to ease and space to expand. Within the bones and muscles is power and stillness.
The season shifts slightly after harshness, high expectations and demands and a lingering sense: “Is that all there is?” Outward conditions seem much the same, but our awareness begins to shift away from that sense of constriction to dreams of life as we think it should be. For some, that image of “life as it should be” is not a mere fantasy but a thing in itself, so obvious in its elegant workability that the failure of others to see so clearly leaves the dreamer feeling alienated.
Those dreams seem so tangible and real that one feels tempted to simply turn aside from the rote necessities and compromises of the world as it is and invest wholly in the dream, to push for a radical alteration in outer conditions to make possible the vision. “All I need to do is push, and others will see.” So fixated can we become on the change we want that we might begin to withhold from ourselves or others any information that complicates or undermines the effort, which in turn renders the effort more vulnerable to problems related to this information. Think of a politician striking out a bold new campaign with a secret lingering in their history, a secret they pray is never made known. Now the secret is a land mine waiting to go off, where the politician could consciously defuse the mine and control the narrative by revealing the secret in their own way.
Our beautiful imagined city could never exist in this world because the mind is capable of imagining infinite possibilities while removing inconvenient laws of nature or emotional realities from its estimation. When we allow ourselves to be seduced by an elegant and simple vision of humanity, we have likely neglected to account for important realities that will certainly crop up and interfere with the work. Others will rebel or dissent and their disagreements might make no sense to us. Many of the most heated intellectual arguments between people become fixed and unresolvable because they do not account for the underlying emotional complexities. Two people may essentially agree on a vision but stay stuck in their conflict because parts of them are afraid of being left out or oppressed if the other person “wins.”
We need our dreams, nevertheless, and our beautiful perfect fantasies to lift us from the morass of accepting life as it is, particularly when life as it is feels unworkable, unjust, or painful. Dreaming allows us to imagine possibilities that are not immediately practical. Dreaming accesses the spark of inspiration that feeds action and sets things into motion. What is within yearns to mix with what is without. When we risk putting our dreams and inspirations into a form, to bring them into being, then we begin the alchemical process of transforming self and world.
What vision of life have you not yet dared to dream? What kind of society would you want to enact? How can we begin to share our visions and hopes in a spirit of building coalition and spinning together a communal vision of possibility?
At times, all feels frozen, stuck, or fixed. Looking around, the mind sees only impossible circumstances with impassable obstacles. The pond is ice-still and the trees are bare. Yet a sharp, painful hope continues to stir and disrupt what otherwise would want to become numb and resigned to misery. This feeling arises, this longing for more, this longing for movement and flow, which the mind shuts down saying, “There is nowhere to go. There is no way out. Nothing will ever change.”
Even still, parts of the self are waking up and wanting attention. Old fears and wounds, shame, guilt, passions or hopes stir at some unheard alarm and sit up. The longing returns, to be whole, to be healed, to be free of these burdens and patterns and create a life only dreamt of. What if these awakenings are the gift that will lead to this liberty? What if we could stop waiting for the world to give us what we think we need for freedom? What if we did not need that special person to save us from this situation?
Himalaya Lakes, by Liran Ben Yehuda
We need a daring that defies the logic of stuckness, the logic that narrows the gaze and keeps focused on what has failed, what has not succeeded, what doors are shut. The stirring inside is the fire that could fuel a kind of faith in the life desired, a feeling of being that we crave. Perhaps at this time this faith is only an idea, an image, a wish that is scary to name. If we are not willing to name this for ourselves, the world has nothing to offer us. We do not have to know the entire wish, the full intention. Perhaps all that is available is this spark of desire and a glimpse of what step to take next.
The mind says this feeling will only appear when we get a new job, a new lover, a new haircut, more money—all things that could be useful supports but cannot create within the feeling desired. These wishes for outer changes are a way of avoiding the truths arising within the self. We need to learn to make room for this discomfort and discord.
Within us is a yearning that defies the reasoning of the mind, though it needs the mind’s reason as an ally. It needs the mind’s capacity to adapt, to loosen its attachment to how an outcome will occur. The image of the dream will never be the reality, and the mind cannot accurately know what will happen with every step, but the mind can anticipate, can research, can plan, can prepare. All of this can be done in service to the yearning to dare, the willingness to stalk across the frozen lake, to stand beyond the stuckness and begin calling in a new kind of joy, a new kind of blessing.
Breathe in space for the self, making room for all the disagreements and doubts and hopes, and allow them to speak. Breathe in a new openness, a willingness to make new possibilities. Imagine the quality of life you would like to live and, today, face each situation as though you already possessed that quality.
In times of success, there looms already the presence of failure. Times of misery are limned with bliss. The longest night of the year is the gateway for the return of light.
Sometimes our strength is too fragile, and needs time to rest and become strong enough to overcome our weakness. Sometimes our weakness is exactly what is needed to stop our strength from becoming tyrannical.
If you are in misery, call to that part of yourself that remembers joy, that can envision a time when things are better. Let that enter your body, fill you with its sense of being. If you cannot fathom such a part, then send out your wish to know it.
If you are in joy, remember that part of you that suffers, that feels outcast, that feels hurt or exiled, and send it some love. Imagine that time is a circle and you can reach across the expanse to bless that which needs blessing.
All of this will pass and return and pass again. Within us is the center around which all things turn, that emptiness upon which the wheel depends. If you can, breathe into that stillness, that emptiness, and let it expand. The wheel continues to turn around you, within you, and you are there.
From this place of presence, call upon those extremes within you, all your love and hate, your joys and woundedness. Gather the reins, and choose who you will be today.
This will be my last post of 2014. Thank you to everyone who has read and shared my work and let me know how it has affected you.
This is a mental habit, an automatic thought that arises when it’s time to sit down to write. Another automatic thought is “I don’t know,” which has a far more expansive field of meaning—“I don’t know” arises in response to many questions and demands.
On another layer is the emotional quality of feeling stuck, feeling stifled somehow, suggesting another truth. Some part of me felt the wish to show up to writing, and if there is a longing to write, there must be something to say. Yet that urge to express something has met with the leaden habit of resistance, “I’ve got nothing to say.”
The anxiety that emerges is, in my observation, often what happens when resistance blocks energy seeking expression. Anxiety is the longing to act rubbing against a refusal to act. If the longing cannot overcome the refusal, anxiety grows larger and more intense, or burns down into a dull depressive flame. Energy wants to move.
On another layer is the physical experience of standing here at my desk, looking at the screen, feeling the keys under my fingers, noticing those feelings of anxiety and stuckness. Somewhere in my gloriously biological brain, synapses are firing and moving closer together, braided into a new configuration, a complexity that yields new insight and activity. For whatever reason, as a human, I am not content with the contents of my brain. Some drive seeks to forge new connections, prune connections that lead to suffering, to find a new truth amidst the information my senses constantly receive.
The Ba (Soul) Returning to the Corpse
On another layer is what might be called the soul, the Self, the psyche, a part that is highly contested and difficult to find if you’re looking for it. This part seems a totality that is and is separate from the whole. When I dream, my waking mind’s rigid habits of thought relax and my mind’s eye opens to how this part of me, this psyche, perceives the world: A symbolic, non-rational, and profoundly deep and complex experiencing. It is here, I think, that the impulse seeking expression has its origin. Here are the muddy roots, the nourishing dark decay.
The mind is an expert organizer and manager, and the psyche is fertile chaos, an uneasy partnership. Disconnected from its roots, the mind becomes enamored of its own rationalizations. Our stories harden and our beliefs about ourselves and the world become fixed. Often these stories and beliefs are the strategies we use to manage or avoid these deeper experiences that threaten to overturn the mind’s certainty.
We think we are engaging in intellectual discussions when we are really arguing because we feel judged or unsafe and the emotional part of us is closing down. We ignore emotions that are not what we think we should feel. We engage in habits of thought and action that shut us down, block our self’s expression, and sometimes actively hurt us because our mind believes these habits are necessary for survival.
We can liberate the mind and sink deeper into the Self. We can become skeptical of our own rationalizations and stories, and we can look to what emotions lie beneath, what bodily sensations, what stirrings of the soul. We can allow room for the non-rational, those images, practices, or beliefs that are mind cannot easily contain and integrate. We need these experiences to keep ourselves from becoming stuck and blind in our mind’s self-perpetuating cycle. We need the things we do not understand to invite us to continue going deeper, forging those new connections, seeking what lies beneath.
Pain lingers long after the injury. The automatic recoiling at any reminder of the wound, that aching throb that continues after jamming one’s thumb. It is easy to become mad at someone who “pushes your buttons,” and surely there are relationships in which our friends and enemies find our buttons with intuitive ease, stirring up painful reminders of past failures or unhealed wounds. Those reminders continue after the button was pushed. We might walk away from the person, the conversation, and hours later still ruminate on what happened. The button-pusher is not there, doing this to us. The pain is now about us, about what in us needs attention and healing.
We suffer, and we fill ourselves with beliefs to try to relieve the suffering or prevent further suffering. “Next time, I’m going to say this and really shut him up.” “I can’t be around someone like that.” “We need to change this policy so something like this never happens again.” The metaphor of emotional baggage is so easy to grasp. We drag all of our past hurts with us into every fresh experience.
Often it’s only when the well runs dry that we realise how thirsty we’ve been. We become aware of having lost a presence for life. We may find ourselves asking what happened to those magic eyes which saw poetry in the ordinary? Where went the wondrous self whose very countenance is invitational?
Put quite simply, the emptiness has become full.
The Star, from the Thoth Tarot
(Go read the rest. Seriously.) Reading this was a wonderful coincidence, as yesterday I was in contemplation and got the message, “Empty your heart.” Every “should,” every expectation, every irritation with how life as it is does not measure up to an intangible, impossible perfection is a drop of stale water that fills the cup of the heart. All of this mingles with our blessings and grace, the love and compassion we are capable of feeling.
We can bring innocence back into our lives without losing the lessons. We do not need to become naïve and recklessly trusting. We can pour the contents of our hearts out as an offering to the world, all that bliss and pain, and become open. This is not as simple as willing yourself to let it go, but it is a practice to cultivate. Bringing presence to the pain, sharing it with a trusted friend or professional, making art with it, all of this provides the possibility for more space and emptiness.
We can start by setting an intention to become open, to become empty, to become innocent. When walking down the road, we can notice ourselves preoccupied with thoughts or stale feelings and choose to open our awareness. We can focus on our senses, notice how things really smell today, how they feel now, what sounds are occurring that we might not have noticed. Ask yourself, “What is happening right now? What am I not noticing?” Experience something as though you’ve never seen or touched it before. With practice, we can bring this innocence to our jobs, our relationships, even our experiences of self.
Beautiful sound emerges from the hollowness of the drum, the emptiness of the bell. We need space within to allow experience to flourish and emerge.
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