Anthony Rella, MA, LMHC

Category: Spirituality

Writing that is more spiritually oriented, drawing upon nature-based and esoteric influences.

  • A Ritual for Times of Crisis

    While reading the New York Times‘s survey of therapists about the mental health crisis co-occurring with the COVID-19 pandemic, I could only nod my head. Even operating my own private practice I have noted the tremendous increase in demand for services beyond my capacity to meet it; the difficulty of finding therapists who are financially accessible to clients in need or even simply taking on new clients; the limits of my own capacity to meet the need; and the increased acuity in what my ongoing clients are dealing with in their own work.

    I believe the ongoing transformation our culture is undergoing will continue to demand changes of mental healthcare, both what we think of as mental healthcare and how it works. Already Telehealth is becoming a normal way of delivering care rather than an inferior and exceptional method.

    I find myself wanting to go back to basics. What is health? What is mental health? Our collective definitions of those words tend to base itself on a state of being conducive to surviving in a capitalist empire: capable of continuing to work and ideally producing children so we have future workers. On top of that foundation we lay all our dreams and fantasies of ecstatic life, a robust immune system that defeats all invaders, emotional intimacy that’s not threatening, wealth, and status with spiritual attainment.

    The thing about that is, most of those expectations come from a world we no longer inhabit. So we are in a time of thick fog, trying to follow a path once suggested to us that we can no longer see. We can hardly feel confident about what we think is coming down the path.

    From a trauma-informed perspective, all the ways that we respond to stress, confusion, and lostness are completely rational ways our system is trying to keep us going. Even the ones that feel shameful. And, as we know, those responses tend to have their own limitations. They’re about getting through the moment rather than stepping back to rethink the goal.

    We need to get lower to the ground, to feel and sense our way through, until the fog clears and we can see again.

    Since I cannot be a therapist to everyone, and you may have contacted thirty people who mostly didn’t call you back and you’ve given up on getting help, I wanted to offer you this ritual. It does not offer answers, or make everything okay, but it can support you in finding your way through.

    In this audio file, the writer Anthony Rella reads aloud the next paragraphs in this article, and then at 2:45 guides you through the ritual. You may use it if you’d like the support, or you can print out the text of this article and refer to it as needed.

    When you are in distress, overwhelmed, enraged, or at your limit—or feel yourself reaching that moment—I encourage you to take time to do this full ritual. Above is an audio recording if you want my voice to guide you through the steps, or you may print this text or copy it onto your device.

    This ritual uses the five elements of the Western tradition: Air, Earth, Water, Fire, and Spirit. I am drawing upon my own spiritual practice, traditions, and training, and offer this to you with no expectation that you commit to any particular path. If you have familiarity with this kind of work you may notice that I guide you to move counter-clockwise, which is the direction of dispersal.

    Try find a space where you can be undisturbed for twenty to thirty minutes. Turn off notifications on any devices and ask folks to leave you alone, unless they want to participate with you. You are encouraged to speak out loud with vigor if you can do that in your space, but “speaking” within your mind is okay if that’s what you need to do. I wrote this to be as accessible and simple as possible, but there is space to add more. You may, if you wish, add a representation of each element in the four directions named—a photo, a colored candle, an object that represents the element, and so forth.

    The ritual is written for one person, but if you have co-participants, here are two possibilities: you could do the ritual as written together, having your own experiences. Or, you can take turns sharing and witnessing. For example, when working with air, one person could share out loud the stories of their distress, while the other person simply witnesses—not responding with comments, suggestions, or judgments, simply being with it. Then you can switch, where the witness speaks and the speaker witnesses.

    I recommend you do the whole ritual the way I’ve presented at lease once before modifying it, but if you find any piece is inaccessible please make whatever changes are necessary. After you’ve done the whole ritual once, you may find one or two elements work well for you, and you can use them as needed.

    Begin in the center of your space. Inhale and then exhale until your breath has completely emptied out three times, imagining as you exhale that you are sinking into the ground, which receives the weight of your burdens, stress, and tension.

    Then begin square breathing: inhale for a count of four; hold for a count of four; exhale for a count of four; and then hold for a count of four. Return to this pattern of breathing throughout the ritual when you need to center or settle, but do not stress about doing it continuously, especially when speaking.

    Say:

    I who am the beauty and strength of the earth

    made skin and bone, blood and fat and muscle,

    call to those who would love and honor my need,

    and send away any who would bring me harm;

    may you find a place for your own ease.

    An image of a sunrise behind a scenic view, including a forest, a river, and snow-covered rock.

    Turn toward the east. Imagine there is a breeze blowing eastward, toward the rising sun or, if you like, another star in space. Tell the breeze your stories of distress, what burdens and bothers you, what brings you anxiety and fear. If you can, speak these out loud. Imagine the breeze carries these words from you into the light and heat of the sun.

    When you feel complete, turn toward the north. Imagine your body is a snow-covered mountain at the top of the world. Notice any tension, pain, tightness, or constriction, or unpleasant sensations. Imagine the coolness of the snow sinking in to soothe your pains, or the melting waters carrying your burdens into the earth.

    When you feel complete, turn toward the west. Invite into your awareness any emotions you are having, even if those emotions are numbness and emptiness. Imagine there is a river moving through you, and you can pour or allow these emotions to mingle and flow with the currents of that river moving toward the wide, deep, vast ocean, where there is space and room for every feeling. If it feels right, let yourself broaden and deepen to become the ocean.

    When you feel complete, turn toward the south. Imagine a fire, and notice what kind of fire you imagine. Does it feel wild, big, and uncontained? If so, keep breathing and staying with this flame until it starts to settle and gather into something more manageable. If it feels cold, sluggish, or small, imagine that your breath can kindle and strengthen its flames until it reaches a vitality that seems right to you. Imagine that you can offer the fire any burdens or beliefs you carry that feel draining, diminishing, or bring you to a sense of hopelessness. Watch as these burdens transform into living flame.

    When you feel complete, sit in the center, facing any direction. Return to the square breath. On one inhale, imagine you can breath energy and support from the earth, through your body, and then exhale it up through your head into the sky. On the next inhale, imagine you can breathe expansion and clarity from the sky, through your body, and then exhale it into the earth. Follow this pattern for three or four cycles, and then shift, breathing earth and sky energy into your belly, then breathing it out from your heart, as though sending its energy in all directions.

    Invite yourself to remember all the times you’ve helped others, been a support to them, or had the impact you wanted to have in the world. Try to notice what comes up without judgment, simply as information. Then, invite yourself to remember the times others have helped you, whether they are friends, loved ones, or strangers. Maybe some of these memories carry pain, and notice that, but try to stay with only attending to ways you’ve been helped.

    Ask yourself to think of three people you could contact today to check on, connect with, or ask for support. Keep going until you’ve come up with three names, and write them down if necessary.

    Offer gratitude to the elements in whatever way feels true to your heart, using words, gestures, breath, or even a smile. Then go and reach out to one of those three people. If they are not available, reach out to the next, and then the next.

  • Firecraft and Will

    Firecraft and Will

    Fire has much to teach us. The principles that inform building, tending, and ending fires extend beyond the practical into insights into our relationships with our own life energy and capacity to work toward goals.

    If you’ve never built a fire yourself, you may think it’s easy. When there is drought and the land is parched, the plants and fallen wood dried-out, and some asshole throws a firecracker into a place without any ring of stone or brick to contain the flames—fires start easily, without control, and their damage is enormous. While wildfires serve the vitality of the larger ecosystem, they are destructive for our human perspective and purposes.

    Most of us want a fire that can entertain us, bring us warmth, illuminate the darkness, cook our food, or burn what we no longer need. We want controlled, concentrated, manageable fire. The first skill is knowing the optimal conditions—when it’s wetter, for example, or when we can contain our fire in a stone circle, a fireplace, or a pit, and keep materials on hand to extinguish it if it threatens to leave the container.

    Ingredients of a Campfire

    When thinking about the materials for a fire, it’s important to know there’s a relationship between the amount of energy it takes to get something burning and the amount of energy it generates in being burnt. So a wadded up piece of newspaper is going to be easy to light, it’ll burn nice and pretty, but it’ll go out quickly if you add nothing else on top of it. A heavy log is the other end of the spectrum—it requires a lot of heat and energy to get going, but once it does it will last you a much longer time.

    You can think of it as both “you need to expend energy to get more energy” and also that the more energy you need to expend, the more you’re likely to get from the effort. The first expenditure of energy is getting the spark, which may mean focused energy drawing a spindle through a bow against a plank of wood, or clacking metal or rock together, until you’ve got a spark.

    The exception, of course, are the things we’ve designed to be easy-to-light—matches, lighters, fuel, firestarters, and logs soaked in combustible chemicals. If you’ve got any of these, you’ll need less energy to get going.

    In firebuilding, the spectrum of materials is broken down into “tinder,” “kindling,” “fuel.” These are the spectrum of that ratio, from easiest to burn to hardest, and likewise from least energy output to most.

    Paper, cardboard, pine needles, dried leaves, and tiny matchstick-sized wood all fall under tinder. Tinder is like sugar. Easy to reach for, very satisfying in the moment, but too much of leaves you burnt out and cranky.

    What kinds of things do you enjoy doing that are like tinder? For me it could be scrolling on social media, watching a familiar favorite TV show, snacking, and other things I won’t name in public. Often, when clients and I are exploring their tinder activities, it tends to be the things we go to when we’re really exhausted or bored to get a bit of a boost. We’re looking for energy but it’s possible what we really need is a nap, or a glass of water.

    Tinder isn’t bad, it’s useful, but if that’s all you’ve got then you’re going to be spending most of your time and energy heaping more atop the fire to keep it going.

    So when building a fire, we start with tinder to get enough heat and energy to ignite kindling, which are thicker sticks the size of your fingers or slightly larger. These are like carbohydrates—also easy to burn, but more energy output. A fire of kindling still requires a lot of feeding to keep going, but it’ll burn longer than the tinder.

    What kinds of things do you do that feel like kindling? Could be going out on a date, going to a concert, working out, or going for a hike. We’re all going to have different answers based on our ability, our skills, and our energy capacities. Once upon a time, going out to a bar felt like a tinder activity to me, but now leaving the house for any social activity requires some effort of hyping myself up and reminding myself it’ll be worth it.

    If you want maximum heat with less effort, then you want your fire hot enough to start fuel—logs thicker than your arm. These beasts take a lot of energy and patience to get going, but they’ll reward you with hours of heat and light and require less constant tending. These are the fat cells of fire.

    What kinds of things do you do that feel like fuel? For these I think of the range of bigger life tasks that require a great deal of effort and patience. Could be applying for new jobs, starting a degree, or deciding to learn a new skill.

    There are so many things in my life that I value now which began as fuel tasks. When I was younger, I dreaded going to the gym and doing any kind of exercise, but when I was able to push through—even when it was miserable—I found that when I left I felt energized and happier, and glad I’d gone. Beginning a meditation practice, starting my own business, and learning a martial art have all offered me the same experience.

    With experience and practice, all of these tasks have moved more into the “kindling” category, but it was not easy. That dread of beginning stayed with me for a long time with each task, but I also sensed what the experienced offered would make it worth it, and I left feeling better.

    That’s the key—fuel gives you more energy than it demands. There are plenty of things that take more of our energy than it gives, and those are not fuel. In some cases, these might be obligations we must fulfill to make our fuel activities possible, but just as often they are habits we continue even though long ago they stopped feeding us and we’ve fallen into resentment.

    What you want on top is kindling, pieces of wood that are thicker. Ideally you’d want a range of thicknesses, because the thickness and density of the wood is also its potential. The thicker the wood is, the longer and hotter it will burn, and the thickest logs are what we’d call fuel. But the thicker the wood is, the more energy and heat you need to ignite it. That’s why you can’t just throw a tree stump on top of a fire and call it good; you’ve got to split it into smaller pieces that will be easier to light, easier to store, and easier to use to feed the fire over time.

    Shaping a Campfire

    Heat rises. That’s the primary principle that informs everything about structuring and tending your fire. The second is that heat feeds heat.

    When we’re starting cold, we want to build a fire by starting with lots of tinder, enfolding it with kindling, and then adding our fuel once it’s good and hot. A fire needs oxygen, so adding too much, too heavy, and too densely packed wood will smother it before it can get going. My favorite shape is to build a tent of kindling around a nest of tinder.

    Too many of us, when we’re feeling low energy or stuck in life, expect ourselves to be able to fire up some heavy fuel. Then, when we fail, we think it confirms our fate as incompetent failures. But all it means is that we’ve added too heavy of fuel, too quickly, without awareness of these principles.

    So if you’re starting cold and want more energy in your life, instead of making a huge commitment to a task like starting graduate school, try finding some tinder and kindling tasks that you can get started to build your enthusiasm and energy. Start with one new habit, like washing your dishes more often, and do that for a couple weeks until you add the second.

    If you find you’re struggling and it feels hard, think of it as the energy you’re spending to get this fire going, and look at what you get in return when you’ve finished the task. If you’re losing more energy than you gain, that might be a sign that this task is a heavier fuel than you’re ready to burn, and see if you can find something lighter and closer to your energy capacities.

    A Fire’s Rhythm of Life

    Starting a fire is tricky and discouraging. More often than I care to recall, I’ve experienced the thrill of watching those first flames catch quick and bright and then the bitterness of watching them gutter out before coming to much of anything. By this, I also think of all the times I’ve tried to start a new group, or a new workshop, or get my communities excited about a new project. I think of all the pieces I’ve written that sparked no connection, and the year or two I spent building my private practice before enough clients noticed me that it became sustainable.

    Starting a fire is hard! And what’s hardest is learning to intuit when a fire needs tending and when it needs to be left alone to do its work. We can lose a fire through neglect or smothering. In these learning stages we can only make choices and see what happens, then adapt.

    That feels like a deep lesson, one that I can’t say I’ve fully learned. Fire teaches us that if we don’t interpret missteps and collapses as signs of divine judgment—if we can keep learning, adapting, and trying—eventually we’ll get a good fire going. But in experiencing the disappointments and failures of the work, eventually we may decide it’s not worth the effort.  

    If the fire is failing, we could try wadding up more tinder and using our breath to get the weak coals going again, so we can add more kindling on top and try to get momentum again. Perhaps we need to move the heavier logs away to give the fire more time to get stronger. Perhaps we need to spread things out so that the fire could breathe—if it’s too densely packed, it doesn’t have the oxygen it needs. Perhaps we need to push things closer together to concentrate our energy.

    No matter how much teaching and instruction we receive, we can only learn through practice. Whether you’re trying to find a partner, start a business, write a novel, or organize a workshop, it’s rare to experience immediate, instant success without effort or failure. We may imagine there’s a right way to do things, and often there is, but on the ground it becomes clear that “the right way” itself contains thousands of smaller choices to make and actions to take. There may be no right or wrong choice to make, nor no action to take that guarantees success or failure. We simply have to make choices, see what happens, and adapt.

    Eventually, however, we’ll get a good fire going with a strong bed of coals. All the lessons we’ve learned continue to apply, but now it’s less urgent and catastrophic. It’s an easier pace to tend the fire, and we can be decisive about when we want to feed it and when we want to cool things down. A good fire could burn for days, if not years, but it still requires presence, attention, and conscientiousness.

    And, eventually, we may decide it’s time to end the fire. Perhaps we no longer have use of it, our we’re tired of the efforts of tending and want to get rest or do change focus. That’s when we show respect to ourselves, our environment, and the fire itself by making sure it’s completely extinguished so it can be safely left unattended. What’s left is nutrient-rich ash, which offers wonderful fertilizer for others’ growth.

  • Maturation or Decline?

    During the long isolation of COVID-19’s first year, I noticed my mind become foggy and soft-edged. I fumbled with words and lost interest in most intellectual debates. At times I would be in mid-sentence and realize I’d lost the path to the end, and it would take long moments to recall what I meant to say.

    The prospect of losing my mental faculties used to terrify me. As a kid without much physical prowess or social acumen, I gambled all my worth on intellect and the realm of the mind. To be the one who knew, the one with the sharpest and most decisive argument, were my positions of power. In the shadow of that power were all the moments of forgetfulness, ignorance, and incompetence—great horrors I tried to conceal from others.

    My greatest fears were around losing my mind. Who would I be without my intellect and smartness? And though COVID brain is not nearly so severe as dementia or other cognitive disorders, these clear lapses in capacity might once have compelled me to begin some ridiculous daily routine of mental exercises to stave off forgetfulness. 

    Instead, I noticed myself feeling unbothered by my forgetting, and slightly relieved to realize I no longer worried about how smart I was. Sharing this with others, I’d say, “I’m not sure if this is maturity or decline.” 

    Photo by Pu Far, courtesy of Unsplash.com

    Commonly, the wise people in my life would say, ”Maybe it’s both.”

    “No!” I’d protest, with futility. “It can’t be both!” 

    But of course it could be both. Maturation is a process of gain and loss. As we lose, for example, the energy and resilience of youth, we gain greater wisdom and efficacy. I’m thinking of an uncle who spent much of his life doing construction on houses. The last time I saw him was with a cousin my age, and a friend of my cousin’s who worked on projects with my uncle. The friend kept going on about how my uncle would take more breaks during their work, but he’d also accomplish more and work longer than both of them. What he may have lost in terms of energy, he’d gained in skill and efficacy. 

    Seeking is Lacking

    What I’ve been gaining in my work is a greater sense of self-acceptance and the capacity to accept, acknowledge, and nurture all of my parts. And with that has come a decrease in the need to be the smartest guy in the room, to “prove myself” of having worth, and particularly to seek the approval of others.

    That word, seek, carries a heavy burden. Our words for desire, both “want” and “need,” are rooted in a sense of lacking. Seeking implies an outward gaze, a searching for approval from a place of not having it. When I’d seek validation or approval from others, and didn’t get it, I would be thrown into a storm of self-doubt and frustration. In a state of seeking, moreover, the people who did validate and approve of me seemed less important than those who had not yet, or withheld approval. 

    What feels increasingly true for me is to expect validation and approval from the people most important to me in life. This isn’t to say I refuse criticism, concern, or disapproval. But in conflict and love I practice trying to understand how a person came to their position, and I look for the points they make that do seem valid and worth acknowledging.

    This never means I think their entire framing and context is valid. For example, I’ve listened to folks raise concerns about vaccinations and found one or two points where I’ve thought, “That’s fair. I get why you’d be worried about that.” Those are the places where we can dialogue, but I’m not going to follow them into the wild speculations of their bizarre anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. 

    Acknowledging what’s valid in another person’s perspective doesn’t weaken my own. People have a tendency to mirror what they’re receiving: when they feel genuinely heard and understood, they’re more willing to offer that in return. When they feel dismissed and belittled, they give it right back.

    But I’ve also learned that there are times when a person feels heard and understood but still doesn’t make the effort to listen to my perspective. When I would let this rile me up, I gave too much ground in compromise, trying to placate them rather than insist I be treated with equal respect. 

    These days I am willing to offer validation but I also expect it in return. When in a conversation with a person who seems unable or unwilling to make effort in understanding what’s valid in my perspective, I waste less of my time trying to persuade them. Nothing about the urge to get them to understand me right now serves either of us. More and more, I acknowledge the impasse and say I need a break for both of us to chill out and reflect.

    When I seek validation, I imagine a posture of leaning forward, reaching out, beginning to lose my balance in the effort to connect and be seen. When I expect validation, I feel myself leaning back into the support of my heels, grounded and centered, letting the other person move further away or closer.

    Two Fish Swimming Apart But Tethered Together

    In a sense, the seeking of approval and validation reveals a polarization within the Self. One part of me is afraid of being bad, worthless, wrong, stupid, or whatever harsh and shaming words apply to your particular constellation of fear. Another part wants to get away from this bad feeling by seeking the validation of my worthiness or goodness. Since my inner state is one of badness, the seeking feels that approval must come from outside myself. 

    The fish of Pisces

    Yet these two parts—the shame and the seeking—are like two fish, tethered together but swimming in opposite directions. When one pulls, the other pulls. The very act of seeking approval stirs up that part that believes I am not already “good,” who pulls back in terror that its “badness” will be seen. Perhaps, for a time, we find a stable situation in which we’re able to maintain a state of approval and feeling “good,” but that “bad” feeling thrashes under the surface, in anxiety dreams or moments of emotional overwhelm when we have a bad day. 

    The problem of “the pairs of opposites” in human psychology show up in so many spiritual and psychological traditions, particularly those in the Daoist, Buddhist, Hindu, and Jungian traditions. In my own Neopagan spiritual tradition, we speak of the Divine Twins as gods who embody of this fundamental tendency toward polarization.

    Our perception and relationship with these Twins changes based on where we are in our psychospiritual process of awareness and maturation. When we think of ourselves as only singular, only one thing, we cannot accept the Twins within, and they are at war. We seek to identify with one of the Twins and cast the other out of ourselves into the world. 

    In this state, we often stay at the level of “good” and “bad.” Whatever I want to be is “good” and what I don’t want to be is “bad.” Some of us may identify with this goodness and see badness in the world; others of us may feel the other way around, seeing themselves as awful and others as virtuous and lovable. 

    For example, I often identified as a peacemaker, someone who tends toward harmony and compromise. In college, when my friends and I would sit around discussing which fictional characters we were, or what our superpowers would be, we said that my power was “anti-drama.” I had a tendency to be a peacemaker, to bring down the temperature of conflict. 

    Within this story is an implicit judgment of “drama” as self-evidently silly, irrational, and undesirable. Like I was this aloof, elevated being who has no time for the petty drama of other people. And that judgment also turned inward, dismissing my own hurts, angers, and upsets as petty, irrational, and insignificant. 

    Judgment is such an interesting phenomenon, because so many of us fear it while constantly enacting it on other people. My greatest fear was sharing why I was mad or hurt and someone else dismissing me as being a “drama queen”—making a big deal out of a small, silly, petty problem. So my judging parts became the gatekeeper of what was serious and what was dramatic. But in its protectiveness, it became zealous, and kept too much of my hurt stored in my inner world, and my relationships became more distant and robotic. 

    Conflict avoidance and peacemaking is a survival strategy I inherited and leaned on to navigate my unique life challenges. With such a rigid inner gatekeeper, I experienced a great deal of suffering and problems that could’ve been avoided by being direct and honest about my feelings. But parts of me were terrified of what could happen if I disappointed, angered, or hurt others. 

    Along with this was a tendency—which I now view as a compulsion—to involve myself in others’ conflicts—to mediate, not to take sides—while avoiding fighting my own battles. When I sensed the slightest bit of tension between others I noticed an urge to intervene, to lighten the mood, to explain what I think is going on, or to make apologies or excuses for others. At times, this is helpful—it can reduce tension and increase harmony, especially if I as a third party notice that conflict is coming from a miscommunication that’s easy to rectify. “I think what she meant to say is…” 

    Yet often it seemed to make the conflict bigger and more entrenched. At my most immature, I would talk one on one with people and try to make excuses for the other person, or share with one person why the other was upset. All this did was make people more distressed and angry, and interfered with the two people working out the conflict together. More and more I wonder if I created conflict out of what was merely tension.

    Jung spoke of this as “enantiodroma,” the tendency for a thing to become its opposite, which he learned from Daoist thinking. For me, too much peacemaking and suppression of conflict actually stirred up drama. Imagining how a drama queen could become a peacemaker, I remember people in my life who had no problem bringing up grievances and slights when it affected them, but met my own hurts with a calm, dismissive, “Let’s put the past behind us.” 

    “The Peacemaker” and “The Drama Queen” now seem less to me like separate complexes and more two polarities of the same energy. When we think of polarization in terms of magnets, you may know from experience that trying to push together the same polarity on two magnets causes them to resist each other with increasing force, while opposing polarities come together with great intensity. When we identify with one end of a polarity, we may draw the opposing polarities out of others, and come together in a stable if too rigid embrace. 

    Only when we can hold both ends of the polarity within do we become free of the dance of attraction and repulsion. Or, rather, our dancing with polarities becomes freer. We can flip from one to the other, attracting or repelling at will. Meeting drama with drama might, indeed, work better for some of us. To take care of myself emotionally, to set boundaries, to make relationships work, I need to get a little dramatic, to get into conflict, and be a little messy while we work through our differences to see if we can establish a better harmony.

    Increasingly these pairs of opposites seem less like antagonists and more two allies with different perspectives that can help us to find and walk the middle way. The Peacemaker becomes the part of me that values harmony, collaboration, and building relationships of mutual value. The Drama Queen becomes the part of me that cares about my own hurt and confusion and knows the only way to clarify these issues is through speaking up. 

    Often I think of a Buddhist story in which a student says to their teacher, “Master, sometimes I am confused by your teachings. When I come to you some days, you give me guidance that seems to contradict what you’ve said on other days.” The Master responds, “Imagine that you are walking along a narrow bridge, blindfolded, and drunk. When you start stumbling to the left, you risk falling off, so I shout out, ‘Go right!’ Then you stumble to the right, and risk falling off that side, so I shout, ‘Go left!’”

    When we can witness our contradictions with equanimity, they become our own wise masters who keep us on the bridge. Should I move too much toward one, the other is there to call me back.

    Non-Striving

    Another teaching of these polarizations is that whatever posture we take toward the world is answered. Being too identified with the Peacemaker, I felt both overwhelmed by the extent of conflict in the world and a covert sense of superiority, like I was the only one mature enough to handle these conflicts. This superiority was condescending and disempowering toward others. I’ve never enjoyed people who treat me as incapable of handling my own problems. And it’s a trick that keeps me in this mindset that somehow I am responsible for other peoples’ problems. Not only does this guarantee endless, exhausting labor, it deprives others of the opportunities to work through their conflicts and discover the powers of self-advocacy and intimacy.

    Stepping out of this idea that this world is a place that must be fixed, saved, or acted upon—this white savior fantasy of myself—has been liberating and brought with it a kind of cynicism. What is progress if every movement forward creates new problems and resistance? What is conservation if every restriction draws out resistance and rebellion? 

    Which brings me back to the weary teachings in the first chapter of Ecclesiastes, which I first read as a child:

    All streams flow into the sea,
        yet the sea is never full.
    To the place the streams come from,
        there they return again.
    All things are wearisome,
        more than one can say.
    The eye never has enough of seeing,
        nor the ear its fill of hearing.
    What has been will be again,
        what has been done will be done again;
        there is nothing new under the sun.
    Is there anything of which one can say,
        “Look! This is something new”?
    It was here already, long ago;
        it was here before our time.
    No one remembers the former generations,
        and even those yet to come
    will not be remembered
        by those who follow them.

    Translation via Biblegateway

    Certain experiences seem cyclical, fated, and ongoing in this world. Much of life is spent in hunger and desire, seeking to satiate those longings. Even when we do succeed in feeding those hungers, inevitably we crave more, or a new desire emerges.

    No change is free of creating new complications. We gain new functions and possibilities while losing others. To imagine we can create a lasting, permanent, original change feels grandiose and inflating, which then plummets us into despair and hopelessness when we fail. 

    Yet stepping out of that grandiosity helps us reconnect with real power and vitality. Helping one person we know feels ennobling and gratifying. Solving all suffering is impossible. But solving specific problems is a fascinating experience. My Peacemaker imagined if he could simply help everyone calm down and work out their conflicts, he could rest, which made him resent conflict. But if it’s okay for there to be conflict—if conflict itself is not a problem that demands my constant effort—then I can rest deeply, and I can engage in what feels interesting or meaningful to me.

    Is this maturation or decline? All along, whether people think I’m good or bad, I simply am. My needs exist whether I squash them for peace or raise them up like a burning torch and demand everyone pay attention. What has always felt most healing is presence, witnessing, and compassion. Finding that capacity within me that is neither polarity but able to contain and witness the both, with fondness. There is nothing to win, nothing to prove, nothing to fix. There is effort without effortfulness, action without striving, listening without passivity. Only the understanding that liberates and shows us the path of our greatest wholeness. 

    There is nothing to win, nothing to prove, nothing to fix.

    There is effort without effortfulness, action without striving, listening without passivity.

    Only the understanding that liberates and shows us the path of our greatest wholeness. 

  • Defeat is Mastery

    “For this reason the experience of the self is always a defeat for the ego.” – C.G. Jung

    For 15 years I have been a daily meditator, with some disruptions, after years of approaching and running away from meditation. What finally helped me to connect with the practice was realizing that I had an faulty expectation: I believed that my mind had to be utterly still and quiet for it to count as “meditation.”

    Instead, sitting practice confronted me with how much my mind lacked in stillness and quiet, and the discomfort I felt in being with my full experience. Deciding this meant I couldn’t do it, I walked away until I found a teacher. And then I realized: seeing with clarity the busyness of my mind is a validation that I was meditating.

    The practice is not to be calm and quiet, the practice is to notice and return to breathing. Over and over again. A paradox of meditation is that when we are too attached to quiet or calm as outcomes, we are cultivating an essential nonacceptance of our experience, and it is this nonacceptance that troubles and disturbs the mind.

    One of the teachers with whom I meditate speaks of the pail of water, and allowing its contents to settle. “Trying” to make the water settle only disturbs it more. Simply waiting and allowing the water to settle is all one can do.

    Even still, after years of practice, I find myself frustrated with the busyness of mind and getting caught up in my thoughts. My judging parts say I “should be further along” in self-mastery.

    A few weeks ago, sitting with a group, I noticed that part of me that was so frustrated at the lack of stillness, and realized, “This part of me that wants quiet is so loud.”

    Imagine a child accidentally spilling a glass of water, and then you yelling at the child, “I WANT SOME PEACE AND QUIET!” And now the child is upset and agitated. You’ve cultivated more disturbance than you would have simply allowing the water to be spilled.

    I was still trying to push away parts of myself and parts of my experience, instead of being with them. An idea of “mastery” suggests a superlative will, that a spiritual person of power has such control over one’s experiences that they are never disturbed unless they wish it to be so. This concept carries with it much blame and baggage that causes us to miss the mark.

    The opposing reflection of this idea of mastery might be a kind of divine victimhood, a complacency in accepting that nothing may be controlled and there is no will, we are simply being suffering things happening to us at all times and to be at peace with that.

    When the Master and the Victim stand, however, between them lies the path. Discipline and surrender cease to be in conflict and instead become the guardrails that support us in staying on the bridge. We surrender to what is, and we practice.

    Since that noticing, my sitting practice has deepened. I find myself returning to a strong posture and feeling the sweat of effort, and I find all the parts of me that want attention are present but able to sit with me. And, indeed, I feel quieter.

    Image of a wooden bridge extending across a ravine, with guardrails on each side.

  • Untangling

    In my twenties, I took up knitting because I found it intriguing and I liked the idea of learning a skill that could be put to practical use. Very quickly when becoming a knitter one is disabused of that story, that knitting is practical. That is to say—it’s a skill that creates useful objects, through which one can make clothes, rags, even nets if needed. But it is also quite laborious, and one quickly understands why the temptation to simply buy a machine knit sweater outstrips the pleasures of making one.

    Thread piled together.

    Often yarn will come in these beautifully wrapped skeins, very attractive on the retail shelves, but quickly impractical when it comes to use. Very quickly I discovered that the skeins would become tangled up if I didn’t make the effort to unwind them and then rewind them into tight balls of yarn that would release only what I needed to work.

    What I’ve learned about myself is I have a great deal of impatience for tedious labor that requires diligence and attention. This is one reason why I didn’t stay in my first effort of a career as a proofreader, which requires such work. Unwinding, untangling, and rewinding a skein of yarn is another such work. There are machines that will do it for you, but if one has already created a mess of tangles and knots then those will not help. Similarly, if one has begun a yarn project and needs to start over—which unfortunately happens a lot to me—there can be similar moments of needing to stop when knots become too gnarly.

    Rushing through a untangling only makes it worse. New knots get wound around old knots. Strange places get stuck and one spends so much time simply trying to trace the blockage to its source before you even get to the effort of massaging it apart so it can be unbound. Yet to reject this process only makes future work harder. There were times I simply tried to knit as long as I could without unwinding and rewinding the skein, and then I’d get to blocked places where I’d have to thread an entire project through a knot.

    Untangling is a work of attention, diligence, and love. One could simply cut away all the knotted and gnarled patches, and at times one must, but that is a loss of beautiful yarn and the possibilities of that one undivided thread. If one wants to preserve the threads, one must untangle.

    In working with the Self, with relationships, with communities, there are times when our stuckness comes from not taking this time to untangle: When there is a giant fight or a grudge we don’t understand, and we want to push forward, only to find ourselves even more stuck. When we want to make a big change and we feel this urge to do it now, and we don’t take the time to research, talk to the important stakeholders in the change, and then find them binding us.

    Untangling is slow work that makes future work easier. When a client comes into therapy, for example, wanting a specific change in their life, they may be frustrated. The change seems so simple but they can’t seem to make it happen. Every step of progress generates some setback.

    Instead of focusing on the whole knot, and getting overwhelmed, we are served well by picking a thread and following its path through the knot. This thread could be how masculinity informs the problem. The thread could be how the economic situation informs the problem. The thread could be how their relationship with their mother informs the problem.

    We long to find the one single thread that untangles the whole, but humans are too tangled and intertwined for that. Yet as we follow each individual thread, truly seeing its journey and its path, we create a little more space and looseness in the knot. Thread by thread, we begin to separate out what can be separated, to see how each interacts with the other. We make little changes. We learn to go for a walk instead of sending an angry email. We learn how to calm the body under stress. We learn how to say no and yes in the ways that serve us.

    So much misunderstanding and tension arises when try to simplify this process and only look at one thread, only apply one lens to the entirety of our knotted challenges. It’s all a neurological problem. It’s all about what my parents did. It’s all their fault. It’s all my fault.

    Untangling slows us down and frustrates us because it feels like nothing is happening. We are well served to remember the finger trap, that puzzle that only grows tighter the more we pull and struggle. It’s in relaxing and coming together that things unbind and we find freedom.

    Patience is a practice we bring to difficult and complex situations that cannot be easily resolved. Many of the problems in our lives will not be solved before we die. Rushing to fix may entangle us more. Giving up and doing nothing leaves us entangled, despondent, and without aliveness. Patience is a practice of doing the work in front of us with as much attention and diligence as we can bear.

    Eventually we find, when we’ve moved through the frustration and despair, a calm pleasure in doing and being of service. And we may find we’ve unknotted enough to have useful material with which we can make something new.

    An image of ropes and chains hanging together.
  • Dreaming as Escape and Invitation

    Dreaming as Escape and Invitation

    When I was younger and felt less at home in the world, one of my escapes was to wrap my awareness into daydreams. These dreams could be quite elaborate and even serial, typically around relationships I longed to build with people I found attractive or admirable but felt too inadequate to approach in person. Sometimes these were very deep, long, reflective conversations; other times they were relationship arcs: how we’d finally begin to speak, the rising action of our connection, special moments together, even the ways we’d finally break apart.

    In a sense, these fantasies were a balm to loneliness and anxiety, yet they took on an agency of their own. There were parts of me that actively resisted presence in life, finding it disappointing and demoralizing in contrast to the mental reality in which I had control.

    Except—I didn’t really have control. In my mind I could make these images sock puppets of my inner self talk to each other, but it was difficult to pull my mind out of the dream and back into dealing with my daily life. The mental theatre of life was missing aliveness, spontaneity, fulfillment.

    This is an example of what I’d call a “coping strategy,” a habit that helps smooth the sharp and painful edges of painful reality. Coping strategies are useful, and they are limited in that they do not help us to do the work of transforming that reality. Often coping strategies may actively resist the changes of life, which tends to require a certain amount of experiencing pain and discomfort to ensure transformative action is thorough, effective, and includes as many of our parts as possible.

    And there are times when coping is a perfectly good move. There are certain experiences in life that cannot be transformed all at once, or are so overwhelming that we do not have the space or capacity to feel and transform. When we are trapped in a relationship, a home, or a country by an abusive person, a certain measure of coping is necessary to get through the awfulness while we strive to find an escape.

    But a coping strategy also contains within it truth about ourselves. Lately I find myself falling back into that pattern of getting lost in my imagination. Sometimes that lostness means having intense and irritable arguments with people in my mind that I would never have in person. Sometimes it means imagining relationships or experiences that are deeply unlikely.

    Along with that, I strive to also practice what I’d call “Self-care,” which are the practices that bring presence and awareness into life and let that awareness illuminate the inner and outer work that reduces suffering. Self-care is sitting meditation, calm conversations with our loved ones about difficult relationship patterns, tarot readings, baths, and walks. Self-care is also showing up to protests, challenging unfair working conditions, educating one’s self about one’s history and material realities.

    Self-care is also simply being alive, feeling one’s feelings, and not looking at life as something that requires fixing or salvation. My daydreaming, I think, has a touch of the salvation within it.

    Parts of me have struggled, like all of us, with the grief, stress, and enormous contraction in my life due to stay at home orders and pandemic safety measures. When there is no clear finish line, staying in the stress of it begins to feel intolerable. I can endure much when I know it will end, particularly when I know I have control over how it ends. And, though I do know this will end because all pandemics end, not knowing for sure when has been painful. So it makes sense I’d start escaping into fantasy.

    In my younger years the romantic notion that I kept envisioning was that somehow I’d befriend a person, a wise person, or find a lover who would finally both see me and save me. See in me all the potential and goodness I had to offer, and save me from my self-loathing and self-defeating habits. Eventually, however, I started to find the wisdom that I was doing that work for myself—I was cultivating an inner capacity to see myself through this imaginal work, to see my merits and strengths but also my avoidances.

    Image of a woman fulling through a purple backdrop, photo by Bruce Christianson.

    Dreaming is a beautiful practice of stepping outside of the limitations of ego and envisioning other worlds. By necessity those worlds cannot exist in this one in the way we imagine. Imagination is a powerful engine. In some esoteric traditions, it is the capacity through which we encounter beings and energies not of the material world.

    Yet it’s all mixed up with our personal unconscious. Some clients tell me they imagine having conversations with me between sessions. What they are doing is talking to a part of themself whose nature and capacity is expressed by whatever it is they symbolically associate with me.

    In a sense, we can look at dreams in this way, whether they are sleeping or waking dreams. Many dreams are whisperings from parts of us who we do not recognize as parts of us. They appear in monstrous costumes, or like friends and ex-lovers, or colleagues or family members, or spiritual beings. Perhaps these fantasies show us something we long for ourselves that we’re not ready to claim, or could become ready to claim. Perhaps they’re ways of testing and playing out patterns to imagine how they unfold.

    And, in some spiritual traditions, we may dream of the real beings that are not merely psychological internalizations. There are dreams I have in which a person tells me a message, and I relay that to the real person in waking life, and that message has meaning for them. There are dreams I have that prefigure future events that happen later—rarely in a way that’s useful to avoid the events, but often in a way that helps me work through them more quickly. There are dreams I have had in which I am certain I encountered the real person’s psyche, and dreams in which I am certain it was not the real person, and none of these certainties are verifiable in an experimental design.

    Dreams are softer and more liquid than goals. A goal is so concrete and fiery. It pushes you in a clear direction and brings with it the experience of obstacles, successes, and failure. Dreaming flows, expands, deepens, and reveals. Now may be a good time to dream, and to see what the dreaming means.

    What does the dream pull you toward? Truth telling? Adventure? Risk? Playful experiences? Possibilities of living you’d not allowed yourself to consider? What if these dreams were not about escape, but about planting seeds that you may choose to nurture?

  • The Liberatory Flame

    In the United States, we are passing through a threshold of change. At this moment no one is sure what will be on the other side, and it is possible that we will not know by tomorrow what is on the other side, and that it may take much longer than we like to know.

    No matter who wins the government elections, we are still passing through other thresholds. We are in the midst of a pandemic. We are in the midst of an escalating climate crisis. We are having and raising children. We are taking care of the people who are living.

    There is not going to be a singular event that determines history. An event is like a catalyst, like throwing active yeast into flour. An event sets reactions in motion that transform the matter into something else. The 9/11 attacks were one such event. The last election was another. The onset of coronavirus another.

    We are periodically reminded of our limitations. How our lives are shaped by historical, political, and economic forces that we only have limited capacity to shape. But in truth, only some of us need this reminding. Many, many more have known this on a daily basis for their entire lives.

    In our isolation this year, separated from loved ones and the familiar, many of us have fallen into despair and wondered what is the purpose of anything. Why set goals? Why dream of a future? Why keep showing up to the work?

    And on a personal level, we don’t always know. There will always be setbacks and then unexpected moments of huge leaps forward. There will always be adversaries and people who find ways to corrupt what was beautiful and revolutionary, and people who will be corrupted by time and power and systems larger than the self.

    Corruption is like mold, like rot, like ants creeping into the kitchen. It is an outcome of cleaning habits and environment. It is the natural world doing what it does, breaking down rigid form so it can feed new forms. And sometimes it breaks down things we love, and sometimes those things need to be broken down.

    I do not have answers for us or promises of ease if you simply follow a protocol. My work is about helping others to know themselves and bring that fullness into their lives. None of that guarantees that others will treat that self with respect, but it gives us a much greater chance of finding what heals and empowers us.

    Some battles will not end in our lifetimes. Even bigotries and fights we thought were settled seem to get stirred up anew when we least expect it. Each time they hurt, deeply. Not all of us will survive this time, as we know, not all of us have survived.

    But.

    Think about all the people from whom you have received inspiration, encouragement, or liberation. The book, the teacher, the relative, the friend who showed you something that you didn’t know was possible before. The person walking down the street wearing vibrant clothes that stuck out so much but showed you the enormous world that clothes could be. The person who showed you what kinds of relationships were possible. The writer who opened your mind to a revolutionary perspective.

    If you have received a liberating fire in your life, consider that part of your work could be passing along that fire to someone else.

    You might not even know all the ways you’ve done it. Perhaps it was when you told someone in public that you thought their joke was hurtful. Perhaps it was when you were just smiling and enjoying the beauty of the world.

    There are so many little moments that are unfathomable. There are moments where you might have thought the opposite happened, when someone expressed anger or offense toward you, but it was because you pricked something deep within their souls that was longing to come forward. Something that scared them because they didn’t know it was possible to be you before, and because they didn’t know it was possible they didn’t know that they wanted it, and now that they know it’s possible and they want it they have to live with that knowledge like an itch that may eventually kindle into their own liberatory flame.

    Our lives are valuable unto ourselves, and we are part of a web of people who pass the flame of light and aliveness to each other.

    Photo by bethbapchurch at Unsplash.com

  • Stillness is the Move

    The blog title comes from the song “Stillness is the Move” by the Dirty Projectors, which also has a lovely cover version by Solange.

    Meditation practice was something I’d attempted and failed several times over my late teens and early twenties, after reading a book by Lawrence LeShan that offered a rather straightforward, earnest, and very Western approach to starting a meditation practice. He made it sound simple and profound, though he was dismissive of the spiritual and supernatural trappings that came out of religious traditions in which meditation was taught.

    Yet I would get stuck often, thinking that the busyness of my mind meant I was not meditating properly. And my discipline would flag quickly, and I’d give up, thinking it was something only a particular kind of person was able to do. It wasn’t until after I graduated college and started studying with a teacher who insisted on daily meditation as part of our practice that I was able to work through my resistance.

    A resistance with many layers, a resistance that persists even after fifteen years of daily practice.

    The main resistance was confusing the practice with the results. Those of us who are not taught meditation in a religious context are often drawn to it with promises of overall ease, health, relaxation, and stillness of mind. We think that this is what meditation is—to clear the mind and sit in blissful silence and ease.

    It is not. And our attachment to those experiences becomes a barrier to both meditation itself and having those experiences. It’s very sad, believe me, and it’s not about you as a person. It’s a human struggle. There is a reason we have all these different ways of meditating and all these teachings about “monkey mind.” Our minds do not naturally lend themselves to silence and stillness. Nor do we get there through internal force.

    There are many forms of practice to meditation, but whatever it is, the practice is simply the practice. Focus on the posture, focus on the breath, focus on the way your body moves or does not move, focus on the sounds in your environment, focus on this icon, focus on your inner state. Count your breathing. Imagine you are a mountain. Chant the name of the divine or this holy mantra and be with the sound you are making.

    Notice when you get distracted and lose your practice. Return to the practice.

    That’s it.

    When we take on the discipline of meditating, we are immediately confronted with everything in us that refuses and fears silence, stillness, and emptiness. We notice everything within us that strives for control and is so afraid of not having it. We see within us all the qualities that those controlling parts suppressed—which could be some deeply unsettling experiences and memories that need therapeutic support.

    During my first few months of meditation practice, not only did I notice my busy mind, I became increasingly aware of how much tension I carried in my body. I was in my early twenties and would never have called myself a tense person. I imagined myself to be a go-with-the-flow kind of guy. I was praised for it.

    Once, on a field trip in high school, I was waiting in line for food and a woman blatantly cut in front of me. I said nothing. My Catholic school teachers noted this and stopped me to praise me for my virtuous patience. In truth, I was utterly terrified of upsetting anyone in my life, and suppressed all my anger and all my wants and needs to be as small as possible. Now, I do not consider that to be patience, but rather allowing myself to be disrespected.

    Patience might look like engaging in the conflict with as much kindness for myself and the woman as possible. Or it might be choosing to allow the cutting and being with my upset. What I did was less of a problem than the way I was when I was doing it.

    Meditation teaches patience because it is the practice of patience. It is the practice of feeling one’s full experience, letting go of the controls, and staying with the discomfort of practice. And it is through this engagement that I discovered how much anger and tension was in my body. Letting go of the mental efforts to control my inner experience, I felt how that effort was embodied in the tightness of jaw, the tension in my joints.

    One amazing morning I was sitting and noticed that my right leg was tensed and lifted slightly off the ground. As I noticed this, I noticed that this leg had always been, almost instinctively. And as I noticed this, I noticed I could allow my leg to relax so that my knee rested on the ground and I was not holding myself up so much.

    Later, as a group we were all sitting together for longer than I usually would on my own. Group meditation practice for me offers a greater sense of stillness than I can find on my own, though I find this to be a reciprocal practice. The more I practice, the more stillness I offer the group, and the more stillness I am able to receive. My whole body began to tremble. It was unsettling but I kept breathing. Later, I asked my teacher about it, and I’m not sure they fully knew the answer but they offered that it sounded like an infusion of power into my being.

    Fifteen years later, I think this is true. Stillness and discipline creates space for power to enter into my being. And, concurrently, I believe this shuddering to be a somatic release of tension and buried stress. This experience does not happen often these days, but when it does, I notice it tends to come after periods of time in which I felt particularly disconnected and avoidant. When I’ve spent a lot of time doomscrolling and checking out of my body. When my sitting practice feels shallow and twenty minutes go by with me feeling “I” wasn’t there. Then, some beautiful mornings, I show up ready to engage in the practice, and the shuddering happens. Afterward, I feel like I’m here. My body is touching the earth. I am connected with the people in my life.

    It’s as though something in me was trying to hold its breath and get through the hard stuff. Breath-holding is something we instinctively do when we’re anxious. It’s a kind of bracing for impact, and in some ways it’s a way of trying to skip over the hard stuff. Like if I simply stop breathing then what happens won’t hurt so much, and when it’s over I can breathe again.

    In meditation, the part of us able to endure the hard stuff comes to ground and the breath-holding parts get to relax. Like an adult shows up who can handle things and let the other parts of us take a break.

    Much has been written of spiritual bypassing, which is very much a problem of people turning their spiritualities into shields against reality and their “enlightenment” into cruelty. The problems of spiritual bypassing in New Age and white spiritual communities seems to have flourished in the way so many of them have proven fertile ground for QAnon’s anti-Semitic conspiracies.

    We struggle, I think, to balance our Western teachings around knowing and protecting the Self while also remembering we belong to a whole that is greater than us. To hold sacred both our joy and our grief, our kindness and our anger, our stillness and our action. When we cannot hold both, we see them as enemies and must take a side that divides us against ourselves and makes us brittle.

    A person sitting on a dock looking at a landscape of mountains reflected in the water. Photo by Simon Migaj, courtesy of Unsplash.com

    We need boundaries and connection. Conflict is ongoing and the work of justice will be ongoing. We cannot wait until we’ve solved every outer problem before we can take time for our own needs and wellbeing. And simply focusing on our own needs and wellbeing is its own bubble that again leads back to cruelty, apathy, and vulnerability to authoritarianism.

    Spiritual practice is a stepping away from life for a period of time before re-engaging. We need both movements, to be able to step away and the intention to step back. It is like conflict with our loved ones. We need to be able to say we’ve reached our limit and need to take a break to gather ourselves, reflect, vent, and figure out what we need to do to resolve the conflict. Simply throwing more words, hurt, anger, and accusations upon each other is like adding too much wood to the fire and smothering it. We need space to breathe.

    At the same time, if we say we need a break from the conflict and never come back to it, then we’ve added a different offense. We try to distract from the disrespect, hurt, and unmet needs but they do not go away, they simply linger and grow with resentment, waiting to burst out again in hot, explosive flame.

    What we need is to say we are taking a break, and then to return and engage with a more sober and grounded mind. That is spiritual practice. Instead of sending the angry email, I go and spend ten minutes breathing and connecting to what is holy within me, and then I try to engage the angry email as a holy human person. The conflict needs to be dealt with, but I engage with my full self, and that changes how things unfold.

    Spirituality is not about bypassing, it is about becoming more and more present and growing our Being in life. And noticing when we get distracted, and what we do to numb ourselves and make ourselves smaller, and then to return to that which grows presence.

  • In Uncertainty, Return to Basics

    My Aikido dojo has been doing online practice classes since the lockdown began, a complex gift as it is such an embodied, connected practice; and yet some practice is better than no practice. In a recent class, Sensei had us do a basic staff strike, one I’d already practiced perhaps hundreds of times. “At this level of practice it should be a relief,” he said, like coming back to an old friend. comforting amidst the stressors of practicing at a higher level with greater intensity and depth.

    Foundational practices tend to be tedious and typically ones that enthusiastic beginners want to rush through on the way to getting to the real stuff. The glory stuff. The scary stuff. Yet it is these practices that never leave us, and make it possible to meet the demands of the heavy stuff. Basics never leave us. When we move into overwhelming complexity, we can return to them—for relief, but also as an opportunity to practice new depths, receive new teachings, and discover challenges we were too inexperienced to face before. In the basics are the entirety of the discipline.

    There is a practice I learned from my honored former spiritual teacher, which is available in their book Evolutionary Witchcraft, which has many variations. We use a cup of water, and intentional breathing. We identify that within us that needs cleansing, releasing, or forgiveness. We use toning of a sacred sound to enact that transformation.

    This is a practice I’ve also done perhaps hundreds of times and still am seeking to master. Recently I reflected on its components in the light of all that I’ve learned about the nervous system and the psyche since I first practiced it. Certain practices are found to soothe the stress response, bringing us to a state of calmness, such as toning or singing, drinking water, slowing down the breath, and consciously labeling our painful feelings. All of which is contained in this simple ritual.

    The explanation given as to how this practice “worked” was quite different from a discussion of vagal theory, with language that emerged from and reflected the spiritual and cultural context in which the practice was embedded. We have hundreds to thousands of practices like this, practices of our ancestors, which a post-“Enlightenment” rationalism dismissed as superstition, and now have “rediscovered” and packaged with fancier, scientific language. Now we talk about the vagal nerve, the parasympathetic nervous system, the hemispheres of the brain. Like it didn’t count until we could scientifically justify it.

    Even our current explanations as to why and how these practices “work” are wrong in some way that we’ve yet to discover. New paradigms will come that overturn our thinking and explanatory models. Yet no matter what we call it, or why we think it works, we’ll find that breathing slowly, soft gaze, drinking water, singing and chanting, dancing in community, and visualization affects us in a calming and enlivening way.

    We do not always have to understand intellectually how things work, or why they are, to benefit from the practice. Sometimes understanding emerges from engaging in the practice repeatedly, allowing it to teach us, watching how it shifts our experience. The practice always has something new to teach us.

    In a sense, our work is to both let the practice teach us, and to enliven the practice by passing it along with the language and knowing of the age in which we live.

    I am thinking of this, with great relief, in the midst of an existential crisis. The problems are enormous and overwhelming, greater than any one of us can solve, and right now the possibility of mass cooperation seems quite unlikely. I hear so many of us wondering what’s the point, why bother, and how we can meaningfully participate in this situation. I hear many of us hoping for there to be a clear answer and finding none.

    As a therapist, I’ve accumulated many tricks, pieces of sharp insight, and helpful knowings, and still there are times when sitting with a client and we reach a moment that feels so overwhelming and insoluble that we fall silent in the face of it. I feel both of us longing for a simple solution. And often, the best move is to return to a basic, foundational practice.

    For me, that is listening. Deeply. To seek understanding of the client, both who they are and where they struggle, on their own terms. Without that foundation of listening, attunement, and understanding, all the complex and exciting interventions fail.

    My greatest offering is to practice that deep listening, and in the listening and seeking to understand, a safety emerges that makes possible for the answers begin to unfold in their own time.

    It is a relief to return to the practice of simply listening, like reconnecting with an old friend. A friend who still has mysteries to teach and challenges to offer. The entirety of the therapeutic discipline is contained in learning to listen well. How do I know I am listening? How does the client know I am listening? What helps me to understand? What helps the client to feel understood? What emerges in that space when listening and understanding connect?

    You have your own work, your own disciplines that you follow, and I offer to you today the invitation to consider what your foundational practices are. What is a basic skill to which you can return? What can it teach you today about the work before you?

    If nothing else, remember that caring for yourself is a discipline and offers its own basics. Drinking enough water. Eating well. Sleep hygiene. Moving your body. Resting your body.

    A photo of a child in silhouette, playing a piano, by Kelly Sikkema, courtesy of Unsplash.com

  • The Ripening of Grief and Loss

    Harshness engenders beauty, as the dying time of fall creates ornate deciduous tapestries of color, as a thirsty vine drives flavor into the fruit, as the heat of the sun bakes heat into the pepper.

    Such a sweet harvest then comes from bitter toil, from moments of frustration and despair. We are fated to follow this wheel of seasons, even as we tilt them off-kilter. Every autumn is every autumn. We remember back to who we were last year, who was with us, what we shared. We feel the absence, and feel what has grown in its place.

    Common wisdom for grief is that the first year is the hardest. First we feel the absence of the present, we feel those routines and moments where once we’d have connection and now are only reminded of loss. Anticipated plans and opportunities pass by, and we grieve what sweetness we might have tasted together. An apple we could have shared that now rots on the ground. A familiar seat now filled by another person.

    The second year has its own challenges, for now we are living in a time separate from the year which contained the last moments of what was. We are still passing over the same landmarks, the same anniversaries, but feel the gap between them. Not this spring but last spring we were holding hands. Not this winter but last winter we ate around the table together.

    Harvest is bitter and sweet, as is the taste of grief. How can one turn off love in the heart after being so completely smitten? How can one negate the existence and presence of another? Yet we are skilled in the arts of covering over our pains. We swathe them in new clothes, new lovers. We bury them in food. We withdraw. We drink them to sleep. The lucky and strong among us simply let these pains be felt in their fullness, and continue the tasks of living, knowing one day we’ll be ready for life again and wanting it to be in place when we return.

    Grief has no season, but winter is a rich season for grief, when there is nothing left to tend and nothing to grow. What was can hold the space, can hold the soil in place, can feed the worms and rotting ones while we shelter in comfort and quiet.

    There is no shame in loving and no shame in losing. We journey together until we no longer can. Some seasons of growth are longer than others, but in the end this is a world of ripening, harvest, and decay. Blessed are the ones who taught us with their hands, their mouths, and their hearts how to love more deeply and more courageously. Blessed are the ones whose absence still marks our hearts.

    The breaking of the heart is a pain that feels impossible to endure, and yet to let it be felt to completion, to let it heal in its own time, brings us to a bigger heart. A stronger heart. A more spacious heart. A heart capable of loving others and remaining true to Self. That breaking heart, that grief, is the slow death of those young dreams and visions that kept us too small, too possessive, too jealous and reactive.

    Maturation is a kind of death, when we begin to see how our stories and behaviors are appropriate for a child but not for a person striving to be in their own power. There is nothing “bad” about being childlike, and there are ways of being that children are by necessity which does not make sense for relatively autonomous adults.

    A child may need to rely primarily on a few people to meet their needs, and may become overwhelmed and give up when things get hard, and may feel scared and abandoned when someone they love and need withdraws from them. These experiences may become fixed in us as parts that hold to those child experiences. “I can’t do it.” “It’s too hard.” “It’s unfair.”

    We may strive to give these parts to receive the loving healing they needed through our romantic and sexual relationships, only to find those woundings reactivated. While an adult mind might understand that even when someone makes a promise they may need to renegotiate it, the child self may feel that old devastation and rage at being failed, undergirded by a sense of hopeless dependence. That, “I cannot do this for myself, I need you to do it, and you failed me.”

    Abandonment is a particular example of this, in that it makes complete sense for a child to become terrified by being abandoned by their caregivers, but for most of us who grow into relatively functional adults, abandonment is more of an emotional experience than the existential threat we may feel. It’s painful, and may be scary, and disappointing, and certainly can kill a relationship if our lovers fail or run away when we need them. But to be abandoned by an adult in an adult relationship is rarely a death sentence, unless there are really specific dependencies in the relationship and the partner does not have other resources.

    When our emotions feel startling huge and out of proportion to what’s happening, often they are experiencings of child wounds, with their young and painful stories and fears that have not been processed. And when we feel them, instead of blaming others for them, we can start to turn our nurturing, loving hearts and open minds to attend to these hurt children. They are worthy of love and care, and often our loved ones are struggling with their own hurt children who need attention, so it is useful to learn how to offer that to ourselves.

    An autumnal tree and bushes with mixtures of green and bright red leaves. Photo by Anthony Rella.

    And with that nurturing attention, that healing validation that these young parts need, there is a grieving that comes at all that was lost. All the hurt that happened to reach this point. All the ways we failed ourselves and our loved ones. All the treasured stories that turned out to be illusions. All drying up into beautiful varicolored leaves, preparing to be let go so that something new can grow. Once these stories and hurts served us, gave our identities form and purpose, but something within us is growing larger and ready to grow something richer, sweeter, fuller.

    That spaciousness of heart comes when its breaking helps us to see ourselves as we truly are, to love every inch of that, to be at home in ourselves.

    We break open into this spaciousness, preparing for the time when spring grows something brave and new in the remains of what was.