Anthony Rella, MA, LMHC

Category: Spirituality

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

  • Listening

    I aim to post one blog per week, but this week I’ve found myself unable to muster up anything that feels equal to what is happening in my country. I place a high value on listening to viewpoints that are not like my own, and particularly listening to those whom I want to be an ally.

    Recent events in America have brought us back into confrontation with the systematic injustices of racism and deep psychic wounds of Black people. Here are some of those perspectives. If you choose to read and comment on these posts, please come from a place of respect, listening, and seeking to understand without defensiveness. If you cannot do that, please process your difficulties here instead of on these:

  • Nefertum

    I am he who rises and lights up wall after wall, each thing in succession. There will not be a day that lacks its owed illumination. Pass on, O creatures, pass on, O world! Listen! I have ordered you to! I am the cosmic water lily that rose shining from Nun’s black primordial waters, and my mother is Nut, the night sky. O you who made me, I have arrived, I am the great ruler of Yesterday, the power of command is in my hand.
    — Spell 42, The Book of the Dead

     

    From L’Autel du Désert

    Tides spurred nothing
    heartsore below,
    storming upon self
    long sought, dreamt,
    and wandered hurt.

    So could the eye behold
    skin of waters, lands beloved,
    enacting through wildness
    the dark within,
    whose arms reached
    this sun-kissed eye
    for visions, until life
    longed for wildness
    and emptiness howled
    its longing.
    From nothing—
    dark, wet, fog—
    the sun and stars,
    the blue lotus:
    new skin, solar kiss,
    arms reaching outward.
    Sky cracked with sobs.
    Petals dripped dew salt,
    crystallizing heart.

    Emptiness poured
    forth wet delight.
    Muckbound, earthfed:
    so the lotus unfolds.
    Through his hands
    came essence humbled,
    perfect, crawling,
    enticing sun to life.
    For behold,
    the eyes assent.
    Aching tide sobs the familiar
    within shifting grime.
    So his roots, long-sought,
    dream of surrender.
    Beloved child, outward
    gazing. Be still dew.
    Tears entice, cracking
    petals from crystal
    for wet, new beings.
    Gazing knew delight.
    Being climbed upon nothing,
    beautiful intoxicating
    and so sore-hearted.

    The skin of disparate
    dew child, beloved.

    Nefertum rising from the blue lotus.

    My lotus. Blessed wind.
    Reaching will.
    I beautiful, muckfed,
    sore-hearted need, sought
    my self through grief.
    The stench of blue lotus
    stirred longing, hunger
    for confounding delight—
    shifting each I.
    Blessed Nefertum,
    long-sought, dreamt
    all my days, yearning
    to discover, endured
    to perceive.
    Shit-faced, I surrender
    to your root. Through tide
    and occlusion I crest,
    casting myself to wind,
    enticing relief from essence,
    unfurling wildness within,
    bringing fullness to gods.

  • A Public Apology to the LDS Church

    This entry is of a more personal nature than the usual fare. I want to acknowledge and apologize for desecrating the sacred text of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, something I did approximately twelve years ago.

    The context and details of the act are included in an essay of mine that was published, “Without a Trace.” That essay characterizes well and thoroughly the mindset I was in at the time, but I will provide some context. I had spent two summers working as a closeted gay man for a Boy Scout camp, becoming increasingly frustrated by my complicity in my own oppression (by not speaking out) and by the surrounding forces that contributed to my oppression. I feared coming out, or being discovered to be gay, and losing my job.

    A friend of mine wore a Rainbow ribbon as a sign favoring gay rights, with no other comment, and received a complaint from an LDS Scout group. At the same time, most LDS Scout groups provided us the staff with copies of the Book of Mormon. This inequality between what was allowed to be promoted was a problem for me, as was my understanding of the Mormon church’s influence in continuing the Boy Scouts’ policy excluding gay membership and leadership.

    My experience of oppression and feelings of powerlessness ultimately led to an impulse decision, toward the end of my last summer, to publicly burn one of the Mormon texts. The act was petty, hateful, small, and I regret it completely. We have every right to disagree with and criticize each other, even to work against each other’s values in favor of our own, but what I did disrespected a faith tradition and source of meaning and purpose for many people, including people I have since come to know and respect, both within and departed from the LDS faith.

    As the act was done publicly, and recorded in a published text, I have thought that at some point in my life I would need to publicly apologize for it. I wrote it into the essay because it was true, because it was part of that experience. I do not think I glamorized or attempted to justify the action. Recently, however, I have been thinking about the incident a lot, and my own sense of integrity, and decided I needed to make an additional step. The Mormon church recently gave tacit approval to changing the Boy Scout policy to including gay youth, a step I acknowledge and celebrate even as I would wish for more change toward inclusion of LGBT adults and trans youth.

    Ultimately, I want to acknowledge this because what I did has weighed on my heart, and I do not know any way to make it right. I cannot pretend to have come around to a great understanding of the Mormon faith or sudden appreciation of our differences. What I realize now, with the luxury of more than a decade’s reflection, is that my anger was used destructively, out of pettiness, when I could have directed it toward constructive conversation. I also realize that I value the existence of spiritual and faith traditions, and my actions were not in accord with the person I want to be or the society in which I want to live. I’m not a public figure and have but a few publications, and perhaps fewer people will read this than read the essay, but I need to say this.

    I am sorry, and I will try to do better.

  • Mirth and Reverence

    June is Pagan Values Month and I want to spend some effort articulating how my vision is shaped by values that come from a Pagan perspective.

    In the Charge of the Goddess, a text that influences many Goddess-oriented and modern witchcraft traditions,  Doreen Valiente wrote:

    Let my worship be within the heart that rejoiceth, for behold: all acts of love and pleasure are my rituals. And therefore let there be beauty and strength, power and compassion, honour and humility, mirth and reverence within you.

    These two sentences articulate a clear, expansive, and complex vision of values. One might base an entire life’s practice attempting to embody these words. What I want to focus on in particular are the pairings of the second sentence. Each value pair may balance, deepen, or refine each other.

    Starting from the last: mirth and reverence. These values feel antagonistic. In our public debates, religious communities seem to take increasingly hard-line stances against anything that appears critical or mocking of their faiths. Some traditions, overtly or covertly, frown upon any expression of joy or humor, suppressing the Holy Trickster and making it a demon, or agent of unholy chaos.

    Meanwhile we have comedians, movies, TV shows, and everyday folks who insist on unfettered freedom to insult, ridicule, and offend whomever. Anyone who might criticize this comedy is often dismissed as humorless and needing to relax, unable to take a joke, or infringing on the person’s freedom of speech, often with a rigidity that reveals the own comedian’s tendency to take themselves too seriously.

    When I notice polarization or extremes in a culture, I perceive each in reaction to the other. Each side has something of value to offer the wider conversation, and that value is often lost in the rigidity and tension that occurs as a result of polarization.

    Reverence demonstrates deep and solemn respect. Reverence comes from my ability to set aside my ego and personality and consider something of great importance and deep mystery, something so profound and sacred that it is worthy of care and protection. This reverence is my connection to a larger sense of meaning in which I exist, in which I as a seeker can taste but never fully apprehend. Reverence is often articulated through a religious framework, but I have heard agnostics and atheists discuss their sense of wonder at nature, the universe, and science with a language of reverence. We do not need a God or Gods to be reverent, but many of us find we speak the truth of our experience when we speak of deities.

    The worthiness of care and protection feels salient. From a wholly rational perspective, we may struggle to understand why some groups would suffer hardship or death to protect things that they consider sacred. We may ourselves fail to understand why we cannot simply throw away reminders of the past. The reasons are often irrational, which does not mean meaningless. Meaning arises from our reverence of these irrational impulses. We may preserve or restore the beauty of the natural world because its existence fills us with wonder, or we consider it the living body of the Goddess, or because we believe God calls us to be nature’s steward. Each view seems to share a perspective that nature has a right to exist for itself, because of some intrinsic quality, not because of what it does for us.

    The humor I find least humorous and most offensive (particularly because it is the least humorous) often lacks any quality of reverence. In our culture, we use the word “irreverent” as a high compliment to artists and comedians, but irreverence only has meaning where reverence exists. So many racist, sexist, homophobic, and classist “jokes” have at their core an essential emptiness or hatred for the objects of the joke. I grew up as a White man often read as straight in a Midwestern state, and have heard many of these. The worst of these jokes are simply reiterations of tired stereotypes or not-so-veiled justifications of abuse, torture, and murder.

    There are jokes, however, that cleverly skewer these stereotypes, or skewer the culture and structures of all the oppressive “isms.” There are jokes that are funny when told within the community, by someone who knows the community, but are not funny when someone outside the community tells them. I do not see this as hypocritical or hypersensitivity, since I see this in every group. (See the comments to any feminist blog posting that criticizes men or patriarchy, or any blog criticizing Whiteness and white supremacy, to see the sensitivity of White men.) The difference, I think, is one of reverence. If I know you see me as a human being and can joke with love, then I will feel more easy about laughing with you. If either of those things is already in question, then one is naturally going to be on defense.

    Within our communities and traditions, however, we can find more freedom if we let a little more mirth into our lives. Some people seem to fear that any joke will shatter the fragile trappings of favor and fortune, and lose the joy in living. Mirth makes our worship vibrant, mirth gets the blood flowing in our lives, mirth makes an unbearable situation a source of unexpected delight. There’s no humor so redemptive as dark humor.

    ETA: I think this post by Patton Oswalt is exemplary of the dialogue between mirth and reverence.

  • We Are Divided and Whole

    We must grapple with our internal contradictions. Most of us go about our days only dimly aware that such contradictions exist. A person may spend their days accusing others of being controlling and manipulative and fail to recognize how this behavior controls and manipulates those around them. I may argue passionately for tolerance and religious freedom for some particular groups, and suddenly realize I become harsh and intolerant toward a few particular groups that I just cannot accept for one reason or the other.

    When I was younger, I used to say that people seem to turn into the things they hate as we grow older. My friends would adopt particular fashions or claim certain political opinions “ironically,” only for those postures to become permanent and genuine. People who hate their parents find themselves acting like their parents. Once again, the word enantiodroma is salient, that psychological tendency for things to become their opposites.

    The mystic Gurdjieff spoke about “buffers” within the self that keep us unconscious of these contradictions. We can see these buffers and contradictions more easily in others than ourselves, and we certainly become incensed by the hypocrisies of others while remaining fiercely protective of our own. The ego, that part of ourselves that filters experience to convince us we are consistent with our beliefs about ourself, feels threatened by the implication that this coherence is an illusion.

    The ego is like the command center of the self, an empty chair that could be occupied by any number of different parts. A part of self who identifies as a loving father may sit in the chair and abruptly be displaced by a part of self that is fed up with people taking advantage of him and doesn’t care who gets hurt. Without the benefit of self-observation, the ego is unable to differentiate who is sitting in the chair, and responds to whomever takes charge. Even if we act with total incoherence or hypocrisy, the ego will justify the action, deny it ever happened, or find some other way to maintain its story of consistency. We need to develop a center of awareness that can hold and include all these different pieces.

    Becoming conscious of contradictions upsets us, because many of them cannot be easily reconciled. I cannot say that the dutiful son is me and the lazy comfort-seeker is some bizarre interloper. I can say that both have something important they want, and their wants can feel in conflict. Making the conflict conscious, however, enables us to become more integrated and more able to direct our lives. When the buffers are firmly in place, then our lives are being lived for us, unconsciously directed by these things we refuse to see. We lose touch with our core values. We become the things we hate and believe that’s what we wanted all along.

    We see this occurring at the levels of Congressional gridlock, partisan politics, and the rhetoric around our international interventions. On one hand, we may call ourselves a nation dedicated to freedom and individual autonomy, and yet we may endorse torture or extrajudicial drone strikes. We tolerate the erosion of civil liberties to protect the freedom symbolized by those civil liberties. We have to wrestle with these questions in public conversation. We have to weigh the desire for safety and strength against the values of liberty and individual rights.

    Self-observation and inquiry are powerful tools for becoming conscious of our inner contradictions. We can do this through sitting in meditation and watching the flow of thought and emotion every morning. We can go to therapy and sit with someone who can hear us and gently lead us to our incongruities. We can look at the people who really stir up a strong reaction in us, good or bad, knowing that those charged feelings often lead back to something within us that we do not yet see or claim.

    One exercise might be to commit some time to studying a story or belief about ourselves, something we think, say, or do so often that it becomes the experience of life. Say you never feel like anyone understands or listens to you, and this causes a lot of distress in your life. Self-observation can begin by spending a week with the intention to notice every time you feel misunderstood: what happens in the conversation, how you respond, how others respond. Keeping a notebook can help, making notes about incidents and observations. Then you might explore other angles of the problem. Spend a week noticing when you think you understand where others are coming from, what you say and do to verify your assumptions, what you do when others seem to feel misunderstood. Spend another week noticing when you feel misunderstood and add the question, was there something else I could have done to help the other person understand me? Did my response increase understanding or increase misunderstanding?

    Sometimes we avoid this kind of observation and inquiry because it stirs up feelings of being criticized or dismissed. Admitting the possibility that our perceptions and dearly-held hurts might not always be completely accurate can seem like saying nothing I say or feel is valid. That is not the purpose of this. Self-observation and inquiry is to invite more awareness to the problem, a deeper sense of exploration as to what’s beneath it, and discovering what might be possible. Many of us engaged in this work discover that in subtle ways we contribute to the problem, or we get so caught up in our story that we miss out on other things happening in our lives. On the other hand, you may spend this time observing yourself only to find that you are misunderstood no matter what you do, and you make every effort you know to understand others. At this point, you might be able to safely conclude that the problem is that you’re surrounded by jerks. What a relief it will be to realize it’s not you! And now you have documented evidence!

  • Seeking Completion

    I think we are both smaller and more powerful than we let ourselves imagine.

    I want to say, we are so powerful that our lives, our choices, our friends, lovers, careers, and communities are expressions of our inner longing for completion. Even the problems, even the stuck relationships, even the hurts. Sometimes I forget how powerful I am and feel like a victim to the people and problems in my life. I get overwhelmed and bitter, I think about all the ways I feel depleted and incomplete. Then I stop and think, what if I made my life in exactly this way to help me become the person I want to be? What does this relationship problem have to say about the ways I hold myself back? What is the deeper message of my job dissatisfaction? What is really missing here, and where can I find it if not in myself?

    I want to say, we are so small that our lives are singular blades of grass in a large field, subject to larger relationships and events, cycles and tides of history. Natural disasters, wars, abuse, exploitation, systemic discrimination, violence — these things may occur to us or those around us. They are not personal. Vast swaths of suffering and destruction do not occur because one person was bad, or we as a society were not judgmental enough of a minority population. Groups of people are not oppressed because of some innate inferiority or worthiness to be oppressed. Sometimes I get so caught up in guilt that I become paralyzed, or so caught up in my suffering, wants, and needs that I fail to do even the most simple thing that could help others find solace, strength, or joy. I become impoverished by my sense that I am alone, cut-off from the greater whole of things occurring. Some moments I am lucky enough to see the immensity of stars, land, or ocean, and I become aware of how enormous and vast this world really is, and how even this world is a speck of dust in contrast to the multiverse, and somehow this awareness of scale fills me with awe, a feeling that I am part of something larger than me.

    I do not know how to reconcile these two views with a rational formula. Both feel true, both feel oppositional, and both expand each other. We are neither greater than nor less than, we are necessary to the world.

  • Worthy

    This day is worthy of my attention.
    I am worthy of life.

    What I fear and desire is worthy of attention.
    Attention — not indulgence, fixation, or avoidance.
    Attention — soft, expansive, communicating worth.
    Everything I fear and desire is worthy of respect.
    These teach me what I am.

    Whatever work is at hand is worthy of my effort
    because it is here, it is mine, because I choose it.
    I am worthy of rest, ease, and pleasure as well.
    The goals I desire are worthy of commitment.
    Commitment is worth the cost of effort and discipline.
    Worth is integrity.

    What I want to give is worthy of being given.
    I am worthy of receiving what is offered.
    I am worthy of saying yes to what helps me become whole.
    I am worthy of saying no to what would diminish me.
    What I have lost is worthy of grief.
    What I have is worthy of gratitude.
    What I wish to say is worthy of being heard.
    What you wish to say is worthy of being heard.

    I am worthy of life.
    This day is worth my attention.

  • Gathering the Pieces

    One lens of viewing human nature distinguishes us by characteristics of personality. These range from esoteric systems such as Astrology and the Enneagram to somewhat more scientifically-minded systems such as the Big Five personality characteristics or the popular Myers-Briggs Type Inventory.

    In a culture so prone to viewing ourselves as unique individuals, we seem to gravitate instinctively toward such ordering systems to grasp something about ourselves more clearly. Even little “quizzes” posted on social media—What Type of My Little Pony Are You?—emerge from this desire. We know ourselves well enough to know that we are different from those around us in some fundamental ways, and wonder whether it is us, wholly alone, or whether there are others like us in the world. (more…)

  • Suffering, Healing, and Freedom

    My primary religious context growing up was Irish Catholicism, with heavy doses of superstition, hints of mysticism, and a certain Manichean abhorrence of the body and appreciation for suffering. When I read the stories of Christ and the saints, my attention was often caught by a theme of suffering for salvation. Self-punishment through active masochistic practices or passive fasting from pleasurable activities seemed highlighted as the “best” pathway to connection with God.

    When I changed religions as an adult, I remained interested in pain and suffering. Part of this was difficulty in letting go of all of my former beliefs at once. Many pagans looked at me askance when I talked out loud about the possible benefits of suffering. The pagans who taught and worked with me preferred to embrace a theology of embodiment and joy. To combat the pain-thirsty Catholic God was this vision of a Goddess whose rituals were “all acts of love and pleasure.”

    (more…)

  • Anxiety and Silence

    I used to long for a vacation from myself. The idea meant different things at different times, but most often it was a reaction to feeling feeling exhausted by an ongoing inner monologue, a constant analysis of myself and my situations, and seeming inability to feel my feelings in the moment. The solution, I thought, was to turn off my mind, disconnect the internal censor, and cease the endless feeling of “shoulds” that caused ongoing stress. This shaped my early sense of what it meant to be liberated.

    It took time to recognize this as anxiety. I knew I worried a lot, and ruminated over things for hours at a time, unable to let go. When I feared someone was upset with me, I would not ask directly but analyze the situation to death and ask others what they thought and try to come up with a plan to make it so the person couldn’t be upset with me. You know, if it turned out they were.

    Most distressing was my inability to simply enjoy things. I would sit at concerts, or with friends, or go to parties and get frustrated that my anxious commentary wouldn’t let me be immersed in the moments. My attempts to relax seemed to pull me only more deeply into the cycles, adding judgment and arguing to the anxious thought loops. The mind could not escape its own maze. When I became more attuned to my body, I thought dancing, drinking, or sex were paths to that silence. But when I did manage to disconnect, the result was automatic behavior that was equally without pleasure. Eating half the pizza without noticing or savoring. Drinking to excess and then being too drunk to enjoy much of anything, only to spend the next day analyzing everything I said and did to make sure I hadn’t any regrets.

    Since beginning regular meditation and devoting myself to my spiritual practice, I’ve found myself plunged more deeply into anxiety. Early in my sitting practice, I had a morning in which I was startled to realize I could actually feel the tension in my leg muscles. The revelation was not only that I could have that degree of bodily awareness, but in doing so, I could allow the muscles to relax. So it was with other aspects of anxiety: I became more connected, more conscientious of cyclical thought loops that had no resolution, stressing about things beyond control, avoiding others because of my fears of their opinion of me. As with the muscular contraction, awareness brought with it the potential to ease and relax these constrictions. It has and continues to take practice, and there times when I have to make peace with the understanding that some part of me will continue to ruminate in spite of my efforts. I embraced self-observation and relaxation practices as means to understand and alleviate my anxiety. I’ve also engaged in psychotherapy and pharmacotherapy at various points.

    In the past month, I’ve returned to that early longing to disconnect and now see it as a craving for the silence within, and had the sense that it could be within reach after these years of work. Though not a permanent silence. In fact, I’m no longer wholly sure what I imagine it to be like, to experience such stillness. Turning off my mind is not an ideal solution; it does not lead to greater consciousness, peace, or integrity. Neither does being wholly consumed in my mind. In the Haindl tarot deck, the Wheel of Fortune card shows the wheel spinning all manner of drama around a wounded center, while beneath, in starry bliss, the human face gazes. This is not detachment out of fear, but true nonattachment that comes through being in the world and yet able to observe with equanimity, acceptance.

    I’ve increased my meditation practice for a time to help cultivate that inner silence, and still find there are times when I’ve spent twenty minutes thinking of television shows, perceived slights, gossip, or other distractions and forgetting to notice the feeling of air moving in and out of my nose, and sinking into that stillness within. This past weekend, however, I was out socially and kept noticing my anxiety come up about being in social situations, or wanting to worry about school situations I cannot control, and found that I could breathe into the stillness within me and allow those things to be as they are. Not silencing those thoughts and feelings, but meeting them with silence, a silence somehow whole and organic that allows a deeper coherence to emerge, a voice within that was ready to be heard and to speak.

    I went out dancing last night and noticed again how my mind felt like a degree of separation from the joy of experience. It occurred to me that this space between my mind and my experience may not be a curse. This could be an opening wherein consciousness can hold space. Meeting my mind and experience with silence and acceptance gave birth to ecstatic dancing and joy.