As Facebook is no longer a useful tool for reaching my audience, I am establishing a New Year’s intention to begin using my e-mail newsletters again.
My plan is to send out seasonal newsletters, though I may increase them to monthly if inspired. Each newsletter will include personal reflection on being a therapist and spiritual seeker in these times, a brief Tarot card reading, information about upcoming classes or publications, and links to works that I’ve enjoyed reading, watching, or hearing.
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Yet the news report said they were unearthing “the secret of the residential schools.”
And I started yelling at the television. “Secret from whom?”
This history was taught to me when I was a kid attending school from the late 1980s to 2000. In my elementary school in Indiana, around third or fourth grade, we had units on Indiana history. One section focused on the Native people. We would get little yellow booklets that told simple stories about what it was like to be a Native, how they fed and clothed themselves, what their daily lives were like, and how it was for them when the pioneers arrived. The next semester we learned about the pioneers. Those booklets were blue, and covered similar material from the pioneer perspective.
Even then, as a kid, I noticed out loud, “In the Indian stories the pioneers are the bad guys, but in the pioneer stories the Indians are the bad guys.” And it wasn’t lost on me that we were the descendants of those pioneers—not necessarily literally, through blood, but we were citizens of the nation those people built.
The country built by those pioneers and their descendants did not find satisfaction in its thirst for cheap land and cheap labor. They kept expanding westward, and made up theological-sounding justifications for why it was their right. They kept bringing people from other lands—forcibly through enslavement, or through exploitative immigration policies—to build the infrastructure and do to the manual labor needed to build great wealth—mostly for the wealthy, white, land-owning men.
But at some point, those of us who inherited this culture and nation-building decided to believe in our innocence. After the September 11 attacks in 2001, I occasionally would hear the expression that “America lost its innocence that day.” A quick investigation into collective memory—a Google search—shows that this same expression was often said referring to assassination of John F. Kennedy.
“America lost its innocence that day.”
What innocence did the United States have when this is its history? Our intelligence agencies have funded coups and insurgent armies in other countries. Was our innocence the naïveté that it could be done to us? Is that innocence worth preserving?
Years ago, in my undergraduate English days, Salman Rushdie came to campus and we had the opportunity to sit with him in a smaller conversation. I remember him wondering aloud why American writers didn’t write about empire. In my early twenties, confused, I wondered to myself, “How is America an empire?”
We have army bases across the world and territories under our control who did not willingly join us and have no democratic representation. We have prisons in other countries. And I didn’t know America was an empire.
Telling ourselves of our innocence is an amnestic, a spell to forget our history. When we are wrapped in the comforting blanket of our innocence, all we can see is our victimhood, and not our culpability. And those who would dare break the spell, try to take the blanket, face our rage.
We’re like the obnoxious kid in class who keeps poking the girl in front of him with a pencil and then has the audacity to be shocked when she finally turns around and slaps him. What’d I do to deserve that?
Confronting the truth of our history and our ancestors is medicine. Seeing our collective guilt and culpability need not destroy us our cause us to collapse in despair. It’s the truth that will set us free. It shows us that we are not powerless victims, not noble martyrs in a world that incomprehensibly hates us. We have power, and we’ve wielded that power in ways that have consequences.
Losing the lie of innocence means we get to finally grow up and become responsible adults in the community of all humans. It means the possibility of real solidarity and recognizing what truly are our common interests and values. All you have to lose is your ignorance.
This morning I opened up my WordPress blog’s post history and saw five drafts that had been partially written and then abandoned, unpublished. Each one had a great deal of text and thinking out loud, risks taken and retracted, but the energy flagged and ultimately I decided to pull all the text onto a separate file and delete them, start fresh.
Such a process feels illustrative of my process in this period of time when life feels on such shaky ground that it’s unclear what path to chart. I’d taken time to reopen and experiment with seeing some clients in person for a glorious month this summer, and have now retreated back to all-Telehealth for the indefinite future—maybe a month, maybe a year?
Yesterday, talking to a friend about this, it became clear that it’s not helping to feel an urgency to decide this now. What I’m still missing is a clear set of criteria as to how I would evaluate when it’s right to go back to in-person.
More people than I are struggling with their own variations of this problem. Over the weekend, I was excited to finally see a live performance that was supposed to take place a year ago and was rescheduled due to COVID. This morning, I got news that another performance that had been delayed will be, again, delayed indefinitely.
Disappointments feel easier to bear when I don’t put all my weight on one plan. My has historically been to put too much meaning on a few choices and so, if it collapsed, I would interpret that as a sign of Fate condemning me. “If I don’t get this job, I can’t get any job.” “I was looking forward to this concert, and now I can’t go, so that means I can’t have any joy in life.”
I’ve known people who, comparatively, seem to be resilient and adaptive as hell in the face of disappointments. Their relationships, housing, or jobs implode—sometimes all at once—but they’re brilliant at starting over. Hardly a week passes from holding their hand through the shock before they’re saying they have a new job, a new place to live, they’re in an exciting new relationship. What they seem to have, that I lacked, is a faith in their capacity to start over and rebuild what they loved.
To be sure, there’s a cost. What I have, that they seem to lack, is the capacity to persevere and maintain through upheavals, conflicts, and hard moments. When there’s a conflict, a setback, or a hard patch, I stay committed to working through things with a faith that we can make it better. I’m not as quick to run away, which is a strength that also is a problem in situations where I should be leaving.
Often I think of this when we talk about things like “healthy” behaviors. “Healthiness” when it comes to mental, emotional, and behavioral health has come to have the quality of a shaming, contentless buzz-word. Health is a relative state of integrity, and all of our strategies for surviving and thriving have strengths and costs and consequences. The question is whether our current state of being is supporting the life we want; if we’re interested in growth and finding out what more we can experience and become; or whether the costs of our ways of living are so great that it’s worth the effort of working on one’s self.
Lately I’ve been reflecting on the ideas of Fate and Fortune, both archaic in their ways, and counter to the dominant threads of the United States culture of wellness, spirituality, and positive thinking. “Fortune” is a god who doles out gains and losses according to her own inscrutable whims; who indeed brings misfortune and wealth to life regardless of one’s innate worthiness or goodness. One might attempt to appease the god and bring her to your side through offerings, prayers, and asks for aid without a guarantee of receiving it.
What is more common now is the concept of “Success,” who is less of a distinct god and more a confluence of Protestant and New Thought teachings that suggest one can almost guarantee and invite privileges if one simply has the correct behavior, moral integrity, or mindset. While this comes with a relationship to some outer deified construct—whether it be God or “the universe”—success comes about through our own individual effort and merit, and misfortune likewise suggests a failure on our parts.
Neither concept fully integrates the systemic approach that’s become more full in our consciousness, that some of us are born into conditions and cultures that will makes our paths smoother and our falls less catastrophic regardless of individual effort. Yet “Fortune,” at least, indicates that there is no meaningful difference between the person born into privilege and the person born into marginalization. Neither is better than the other, simply put into circumstances that they must contend with or benefit from in the course of life.
This weekend I began to consider the possibility that “Fate” and “Fortune” have a dialectic relationship with each other.
Fate seems to be a drive from within. Fate is found in what consistently troubles me as much as it is what, when I truly accept it, makes my life more smooth. I think of clients who receive a diagnosis of a chronic illness. When they resist and hate the illness, it causes them great suffering. When they accept it, and begin doing the work necessary to maintain their health with the illness, life goes more smoothly. They may never be “healed” and restored to who they were before the illness, but the illness becomes integrated.
We may cultivate a freedom of will in relationship to Fate, but the conditions of our lives, heritage, cultures, and souls press us to move toward a particular way of being. The extent to which we resist this Fate makes us more battered by it, dragging along behind its inexorable forward drive. The extent to which we accept and embrace this Fate gives us more freedom and creativity in how we work with it.
I imagine the relationship between Fate and Fortune as being like a rock in a tumbler, slowly polished into a beautiful, smooth stone. Fate may be that which needs to be expressed and lived from our being. Fortune simply sets the terrain in which that Fate is discovered and shaped.
The thing is, regardless of how much we accept and live our Fate, Fortune remains a capricious force. Why didn’t I get sick all these times but got sick this time? Why are there people who are cautious who still get sick with the disease, while there are others who flaunt masks and vaccinations and social distancing guidelines but remain apparently uninfected? Why do some die and others emerge relatively unscathed?
All of these questions have answers we may come to understand with time and research. But in our day-to-day living, when do not yet have these answers, we are looking at the mountain from the perspective of the ant. That is how it is to experience Fortune: to be at the mercy of a pattern we cannot comprehend or control.
If it is within my Fate to be a writer, and I write, then all I can do is create a practice of creativity and put my work into the world. What happens to it is ruled by Fortune. Once in a while, a piece of writing may go viral and draw a lot of attention. Often, pieces I might consider more meaningful or important might be wholly overlooked. There are practices I can learn around marketing to gain and keep a person’s attention, but even then there’s much beyond our control.
And as we may get lifted up high, Fortune may also abruptly throw us to the ground. To be seen and celebrated makes us visible, and visibility is also what puts us in danger of cancelation. Think of all those old social media posts that emerge when a person comes into a measure of fame and success. No one cared enough about them to cancel them before they were successful, although apparently they cared enough to remember and track their Tweets.
All of which is to say, right now COVID-19, social unrest, and the extreme weather events of climate change may be the relationship between both Fortune and Fate. Through our distress, conflict, disease, and suffering, we are being invited to look at all the structures of our society and lives that made these experiences inevitable. Disease has emerged from the shadows, and now we must look at what in those shadows makes us vulnerable, and what those shadows have to teach us about our Fate as a species, as a nation, as communities, as families, as individuals.
In spring of 2020 a global crisis—you may be familiar with it—compelled me to move my practice entirely to Telehealth. This transition was not smooth. Maintaining focus and connection in therapy was draining and brought up a number of unexpected feelings and thoughts. As a therapist I’d cultivated a discipline of meditative focus on the client, minimizing all the distractions in my room so I could keep practicing returning to connection. But with my laptop I had a relationship characterized by divided focus and multi-tasking.
One day, in a very embarrassing moment, a client called me out about not being present in an important moment, and I realized I needed to get my shit together. I turned toward colleagues for advice and, as I found what worked for me, facilitated a series of workshops for therapists having similar struggles. This writing offers the insights I’ve taken away from this work, for others who might need them.
Cookie the Pom
Hard Focus
A teacher from whom I learned ceremonial drumming introduced me to the concept of “hard focus.” Hard focus works to push away all distractions from that which it wants to center. In this state of being, one’s focus of concentration is narrow, constrained, and stressed.
Imagine encountering a rattlesnake in the middle of a casual walk, and rousing that snake to its alert and threatening posture. The kind of attention you might pay to this rattlesnake would be hard focus. Of greatest importance is tracking the snake and keeping safe. Your senses may be less attentive to other environmental cues, your body may be tense, and it’s likely you would not be daydreaming about other things or enjoying a conversation with a good friend on the phone.
Hard focus connects to the stress state, when our sympathetic nervous system is activated and primed to react to threats. Even in situations of safety, practicing a hard focus—like trying learn a new skill under great pressure or studying for a test—cues the body to activate the stress state. This is useful to an extent, but it also contains a flaw known as “target fixation,” when our body instinctively moves toward whatever is the center of our focus.
A race-car driver attempting to navigate around a flaming pile of cars would not stare at the cars to ensure safety, as it would mean steering subtly toward them. To be safe, one needs to focus on the safe part of the road, where you want to go, while being aware of the danger.
With hard focus and the stress state, people tend to become ungrounded and lose their posture. Often clients talking about scary or upsetting experiences will unconsciously lift their feet from the ground, like their bodies are trying to draw inward or withdraw from the difficult feelings. Or else the body might begin to tilt toward the stressful stimuli, like how our heads may bend toward the screens when engaged in an online argument.
So the tendency toward hard focus goes with losing groundedness, stability, and the capacity for calm reflection and seeing the larger context. From my understanding of neurobiology, this state seems feels very much related to the left hemisphere of the brain’s capacity to analyze, pick apart, and focus on details, cut off from the right hemisphere’s capacity to look holistically at what is happening and maintain perspective.
Should one spend a day trying to do therapy in this stress state, it’s inevitable that one would end the day feeling more exhausted and more caught up with our parts of self that are afraid of getting it wrong or feel they have something to prove. We can feel so distressed by both our urgency to connect to the client and the constant reminder of the client’s physical absence that we struggle to relax and actually connect.
Wow, I upset myself writing that.
So with all this happening through the screen, now we’re adding complex mental tasks like at a person’s face, reading memes, filtering through a wall of text, crafting appropriate responses. We begin to lose contact with the body and environment and get pulled more into this mental world of the Internet.
Screens and Stress
Screens now connect us, for good and ill, to so many important areas of life—relationships, work, politics, information, self-care and survival needs, all of which are rife with threats that activate our nervous system. A notification that you received a text message from a particular name could spiral you into panic before you’ve even opened the message. Casually scrolling through social media to catch up with friends could go quickly awry when one of them posts a confusing meme that seems to disagree with your core values. Anything you post online could be screenshotted and sent to be used against you in the future.
At the same time, apps and social media encourage us to multitask, check out, and click impulsively rather than slow down into deliberate focus. One could spend hours literally cycling through the same three to six apps with very little stimulation, while the blue light activates the brain.
The confluence of all this within the same object turns the phone or laptop into a symbol of both activation and dissociation: a source of stress and the stress-reliever.
For a time, I wondered if reading text itself invites a left-brained hard focus. That might be true, but in practice I’ve discovered that reading a book is soothing in a way that screens are not. Reading a book for pleasure is enjoyable in part because at no point do you risk the book demanding instant feedback from you with threats to your livelihood and relationships.
You may feel deeply called out and seen by a book, and you may feel your beliefs attacked by a book, but the book is unlikely to post your reactions to social media or call your boss. The book is not going to yell at you for missing a text it sent you hours ago. Reading a book or watching television are not exactly passive, but it is boundaried and personal the way screens are not.
Urgency, hard focus, stressed states then prime us, when reading social media, to look for content that further causes us stress. Often I use the metaphor of wearing colored glasses to illustrate what happens to us in emotional states: it’s like we see the world through glasses that have a red tint, so everything appears red. If I view the world as threatening, then my lenses see everything tinged with that emotional color. When I feel hurt, lonely, or angry, I’m more likely to see a social media post I would’ve otherwise found benign as a very personally targeted call-out. In my stress, I may overlook an important word that changes the entire meaning of the post.
The paradox is that there are red things. We can’t pretend there aren’t red things. But if we confuse the lenses with reality itself then we’ll react to everything as though it’s red and miss the nuance and the possibility of other colors.
So how does one navigate being aware of threats and risks while also focusing on the desired goal? This is what we’d call “soft focus.” In a soft focus, our attention is gentler and more expansive, taking in as much information as possible in an open way. After reading this sentence, take a moment to look away from the screen toward a blank wall or a sunny window, and try to pay attention to what’s happening at the edges of your peripheral vision for ten breaths.
What you experienced, especially toward the last half of those breaths, is a softer focus. You may notice it’s hard to fixate on what’s at the corners of your peripheral vision but also simultaneously you take in more visual information than you would simply focused on what’s in front of you. With practice, there’s greater capacity to hold a center and take in the whole circumference of your awareness.
For some of us, letting our gaze soften feels scary, like we’re losing control, because we’re used to the stress response as a safety mechanism. Yet in some ways we become safer with this soft focus, more aware of what’s happening around us and with a greater range of potential responses.
We also tend to feel much, much calmer. Stress states are self-perpetuating. The more tense you become, the more narrow your focus will be. The more narrow your focus, the more likely you are to be in states of worry, anxiety, upset, anger, or fear. What I’ve learned in doing trauma therapy for almost a decade is that our physiological stress response and what we might call our psychological stress response—our thoughts and memories—mutually encourage each other.
What this means, in part, is that learning how to calm the stress in your body goes a long way to soothing psychological distress. Breathing deeply, into your belly, while looking at the corners of your vision is calming. Breathing in, clenching your muscles, and then breathing out while unclenching is calming. These skills are simple and available to you right now, without you having to solve all your issues, which is so wonderful. The downside is that they require practice and it’s easy to forget about them when we get caught up in our psychological distress. So ideally we would work both ends of this for the greatest freedom.
Grounding and Centering
Put your feet on the ground or on a footrest, whatever allows your feet to make full contact so that your body can feel the support and stability of the ground.
Sit back in your chair. What I do is focus on my breathing and, as I exhale, let my center of gravity shift back into my core. Often it feels like I’m sinking more into my tailbone and pelvis, not so much leaning forward. Roll your shoulders up and back as though you’re tucking them into your upper back. Let the top of your head lift up and your chin tilt slightly down.
Periodically check in to remember that you are in a body. Let your chair, floor, or posture be a physical reminder of your embodied presence.
Softened Gaze
Frequently, during sessions or video calls, look away from the screen. Either notice the edges of your peripheral vision for several breaths, or if you can, look off into the distance. I may look slightly above the video camera in my computer so that it appears I am offering eye contact while I am resting my eyes.
If you have headphones on, this is also an opportunity to focus on the sound of the other person’s voice. What I find is that when I look at the screen, I am aware of the absence of my client. But when I focus on the voice, I feel much closer to them—their voice is so close to my ears, and I can attune to subtle information coming through their word choice, tone, and speed.
Tuning In
Jungian psychologists speak of the “intersubjective field,” which is a construct representing the ways we inhabit interpenetrating psychic spaces at all times. You have your subjective experience, as do I, and we are enfolded in the larger subjectivity of our shared cultures, our shared regions and nations.
None of us is able to maintain a wholly objective perspective—nor would that necessarily be desirable. What we do have is a big soup of all of our different experiences, each of us activating ourselves and each other. The fear I feel might not be mine, it might be yours, but for whatever reason you’re unable to feel it.
Working with this frame means in part listening to my experience with the same curiosity as I would a client’s, and to be curious if what’s present for me is echoing what may be happening for them. What’s tricky is that it may be dressed up in my own issues—like chewing on an insult paid to me five years ago—but if I step out of the content and look at the process, there may be gold. “Oh, I’m feeling distracted and irritable. I wonder if that’s happening for the client.”
In summary, what I’ve learned is that trying to connect by screens is much harder than relaxing into my body and experience and trusting that connection is happening. Trusting allows me to relax my gaze, open up to all the information available to me with curiosity, and meet everything with calmness and curiosity.
This requires a certain amount of practice and diligence, but I find myself more effective and less exhausted having done the work.
The Gaze of the Sage
When practicing a soft, grounded, open focus, I am reminded often of depictions of the masters of spiritual and martial art traditions over the centuries. Their eye gaze often appears unfocused and distant, though they perceive so much. Or a spiritual being might have one eye clouded or covered, signifying their perceptions of the spiritual realms while the other eye perceives the physical.
Image of Odin the Wanderer by Georg von Rosen
In this state we are calm, open, engaged, though we take life less personally. It is a difficult state to sustain, as so many of our parts want to focus on particulars, and our stress and wounding tends to bring us back to that hardness.
I am mindful, too, that my focus in this post has been on the screens but that none of this has happened in a vacuum. While adjusting to Telehealth, all of us were living through a global pandemic and civil unrest, which would be more than enough to engender stress and hard focus for survival.
We are still working through the stress and reactivity of this. Recently I was on a walk in my neighborhood and saw some kids had chalked the ground with the words “all lives matter.”
Immediately I felt a tightening, an anger response, as a part of me now associates that particular phrase as a sign of ideological disagreement and threat. Yet as I kept breathing, I reminded myself that this was written by children. Responding to them with the anger and harshness I felt would not have served anyone.
As I kept breathing, I noticed that when I took off my red-tinted-glasses, I did not disagree with the phrase itself, only when it was used in particular contexts. In hard focus, however, we stop attuning to the context in which the present is happening and instead bring forward the context of all our related past experiences.
The work remains: to honor our wounds and stressors and be mindful of dangers while bringing our attention to where we want to go in the present.
Now that you’ve finished this, I encourage you to once again take ten breaths attuning to the edges of your vision with your feet touching the ground—or if that doesn’t work for you, whatever you can feel that connects to the gravity that anchors you to the earth.
In my twenties I was involved with a religious community that did a lot of heavy ritual work. One of the first lessons they taught and emphasized was the importance of grounding before and after a ritual. When opening up one’s consciousness to larger-than-mundane potential, un-groundedness could leave one vulnerable to overwhelm, nasty energy infiltration or emotional contagion, or avoidable accidents.
When I came into the therapy world, I thought grounding was one of those “out-there” spiritual concepts that would be too weird for Western psychology, but I was surprised to find it deeply integrated into a number of practices and methodologies. Many trauma therapists intuitively or explicitly called for it.
In the kinds of spiritual communities that are deeply New Age flavored and exalt the psychic realms, some folks expressed at best ambivalence toward groundedness. There was a sense that being too grounded means you’re not connected to the spiritual world, unable to hear or sense or connect with the greater-than-mundane beings with whom we share reality. And yet there were the people who were so deeply wedded to that realm and those beings that they seemed utterly flummoxed by the daily work of living in this world.
Among Christians I’ve heard a saying, “Too heavenly minded to be of any earthly good.” There’s a lot of wisdom here, and while those Christians might not appreciate my extending this to include people who only wear purple because it activates the crown chakra, I see the relevance.
Yet this separation between heaven and earth truly only seems to exist within particular cultures. It’s not the “truth,” not a splitting we have to heal anywhere but within our own bodies, practices, and communities. For in my practice, the more deeply grounded I become in my body, the more I become aware of that which is beyond the Self.
As I’ve taught in my spiritual discernment workshops, what we might call spirits are experienced through the body and emotions as much as through an esoteric ritual text. My friend, essayist and firebrand Rhyd Wildermuth, recently reminded me that as recently as the Victorian era, emotions were considered to be qualities that came upon us from without. We were seized by “a spirit of despair” rather than being despair.
Incidentally, this notion of emotions as “a spirit” seems deeply implicated in the demonstrable realities of emotional contagion, and connects us back to the cultural memory of animism that our mechanistic, materialistic cultural threads are embarrassed to acknowledge. Then there are people like Dare Sohei who are more deeply working that vein in ways that seem strikingly parallel to and ahead of my thinking.
In the practice of Internal Family Systems, we can find these spirits within our bodies, and separate them out from consciousness, and come into dialogue with them. The more deeply we can practice this, the more clearly these parts become apparent and are able to communicate the truths and gifts they have to offer.
Without groundedness, however, we have no anchor for the Self to be with and hear what these sprits offer. We’ve been born into these bodies and experience the world through all of the senses and truths they can receive. Our bodies can do things the gods cannot, and that is our gift and our curse. It is why there are gods who love and desire us, and it is also why we feel so often far from them.
To become grounded, however, means to be of and with the body, and to experience life through the body. We are capable of these astounding capacities to separate from our bodies, or knot them up in confusion and fear, and these separations are gifts from those spirits trying to protect the Self from annihilation, yet they also inhibit the Self from achieving its full potential.
Panic, for example, is the experience of a part of us that is ungrounded and terrified. Our panicking parts tend to live outside the present, either in a past horror we experience, or a feared future we fear is coming to pass. When the panic rises, we tend to want to move away from it, contain it, stuff it down, but that leaves the panicking part at the edges, alone in its terror.
When we can ground and feel the body that is greater than the panic, and stay slow, stay present, stay breathing, we can gently invite the panic into that body and groundedness. We can help the panic to feel our slowness of breath. We can help the panic to feel the stability of the ground through our feet. We can help the panic to feel supported, loved, and held by our bodies, which can help that part become calm enough to then take in the truth of the reality it’s in, rather than the terror of the reality it fears.
So grounding is always a useful practice, to make bodies into temples that the spirits may visit.
Having been a child who spent a lot of time alone, I went into lockdown thinking, “This’ll be fine, I know how to do this.” But after several months I started noticing the extent to which I was having imaginary fights with people, over-interpreting signals from friends and getting mad about things that turned out not to matter, and particularly having a hard doom focus on the apocalypse.
After people who loved me advised me to try being social, I scheduled some phone calls and outdoor distanced hangouts with people and almost immediately felt better.
“Oh,” I—a therapist with eight years’ experience—realized. “I was lonely.”
My younger, more left-brained and dismissively attached self tended to need explanations as to why socializing with other people was important. For a time other people seemed unsafe, more likely to bully or alienate than to accept and understand, but I let those bad experiences be reasons to avoid trying altogether.
In brief, Cacioppo suggests that loneliness is “social hunger,” the indication from our whole organism that we are in need of social connection. When we go too long, chronically hungry, we start to experience certain recognizable patterns:
Feelings of low self-worth
Sensitivity to real and perceive rejection
Fears of setting boundaries in current relationships, and a tendency to be taken advantage of
Poor health (positive social connection decreases stress and blood pressure)
Increased substance abuse or self-harming behavior
Increased depressive symptoms (lack of motivation, tiredness)
Paranoia and mistrust in others
Important things to know about loneliness is that, while the effects are the same, the appearance of loneliness varies widely. Social hunger is variable. Some of us need daily social contact; others feel perfectly well satisfied with the occasional phone call or outing.
Our social hunger is also only met in relationships that are mutual and authentic. If your only social contacts are your therapists and doctors, there’s nothing wrong with that, but those don’t feed the hunger in the ways that peers, friends, and family do.
One can have a job where they talk to hundreds of people a week, always networking and being “on” but still incredibly lonely because they necessarily cannot be their whole selves in these relationships. Two people can live together in committed relationship and be lonely. One person can live on their own, only go out once a month, and feel perfectly well-fed.
Being alone does not necessarily lead to loneliness. The easiest way to think about the differentiation is choice. Choosing to go to a silent meditation for a week may be a beautiful experience of time alone and in connection with what is greater than the self. Being compelled into isolation through solitary confinement or protracted lockdown due to pandemic concerns is not chosen, and thus far more painful and lonely.
Chronic loneliness is the ultimate self-defeating condition, with its tendency to make us assholes toward those trying to connect with us. We’re so on edge, mistrustful, desperate for connection and terrified of getting hurt, that our guardedness and vigilance for signs of rejection are highly sensitive. Instead of tolerating awkward moments, jokes that landed badly, or confusing statements, we’re more likely to interpret these as signs of scorn or rejection and then react with our own protective “fuck off” energy.
At the same time, we’re more likely to settle for people who really do treat us badly because we’re afraid of having boundaries and losing all connection. It’s very confusing.
In the past year something obvious finally clicked for me. We talk about authenticity in terms of “vulnerability” because it requires setting aside, on purpose, our social safety measures. To connect, we must lay down our weapons and armor.
There are times when it is unwise to do so, when we need those weapons and armor, particularly with those unwilling to lay down their own. There are times when our inability to lay down our weapons and armor costs us opportunities for the connection and love they long to experience. There is risk in every choice, but from every experience we can accrue wisdom to guide future risks.
In these COVID19 pandemic days, social connection without proper safeguards exposes us to serious threats to physical health and wellbeing, not to mention the threat of overwhelming our medical system. And the lack of connection has tremendous and important social and emotional consequences for our wellbeing.
Some focus on the social and emotional damage of isolation and say we need to end social distancing and masking now because of it. Some focus on the medical risks of COVID19 and say we should be stringently locking down because of the real and enormous risk. These two positions, in my mind, are not equal in merit, but we do need to reckon with managing the physical and emotional risks and the current tension between them.
There are plenty of options available for getting some social connection that are low risk of COVID infection: phone calls, video calls, outdoor distanced gatherings, going on walks with masks.
As more of us get vaccinated, obviously the range of safe social options increases with other vaccinated people. I am not an epidemiologist or an expert in transmission, but I’ve come up with four “slider bars” by which I calculate COVID risk:
Masks: The more people involved are wearing masks, the less risk of COVID infection.
Proximity: The further apart people are, the less risk of COVID infection.
Time: The briefer the social encounter, the less risk of COVID infection.
Ventilation: The more ventilation in the space, the less risk of COVID infection. (Outdoors is ideal.)
When risking social connections, if you want to increase risk on one of these slider bars, you could offset it with the others, such as: hugging someone you love (more risky time and proximity) while outdoors and masked (less risky ventilation and masking).
In general, if you’re feeling lonely and having any of the experiences I’ve named above, consider extending yourself a bit to connect. If you don’t talk to anyone, try texting a friend to tell them you’re thinking about them. If you only text people, try scheduling a phone call. If you have lots of calls, try scheduling an outdoor walk.
Remember, when you’re getting connected, that it’s going to be emotionally challenging. It’s like if you used to be athletic but find yourself getting winded going up a staircase again because you’ve lost conditioning. This is not a permanent situation, it’s simply about getting your conditioning back.
You don’t jump from not exercising at all to running a marathon next week. You start where you’re at, start getting some practice exercises in, get rest between exercise, and then slowly increase the duration and intensity.
We’re getting through this, and in some ways this may be the hardest time, when we can see the end. If you’re struggling, know that we’re struggling with you, and if you can, take a risk.
NOTE: This was editedon 1/9/21 to remove some lines that minimized the violent intentions of some of the insurrectionists, after learning more about what happened in the Capitol this past Wednesday.
Sometimes as a therapist, our clients become focused on a particular answer to their problems that may bring up questions and concerns for us. They’ve been starting to work on their core issues but suddenly put all their hopes on a new relationship, or a weekend retreat, or a new kind of medication.
All the attention shifts from the difficult and scary inner work toward focusing on this new situation. You can sense the hope that finally they’ve found the magic pill, the fix, the thing that’s going to solve their pain.
This new thing is not necessarily bad, though it can be. Typically the new thing may really help some problems, it may create some new problems, and it will leave an array of problems wholly untouched. That’s how life seems to go.
The problem is, when we put too much hope on the magic fix, if it fails or does not give us all the results we wanted—we may be thrown into a feeling of powerlessness. The despair may cause a bigger setback that leads us to give up everything that’s been helping.
Those underlying feelings of powerlessness preceded and gave rise to the hope for the magic fix. When we feel stuck in our problems and pains, and our efforts to change have failed too often, we may hope for someone or something else to rescue us.
One of my supervisors once said, “False hope is worse than no hope at all.”
On the other side of powerlessness, when even false hope is gone, lies despair and rage. The past several years have confronted me with the way my own mind tends toward imagining the big fears, anticipating enormous problems to come around climate change, civil unrest, resource wars—basically anything umar haque writes on Medium.
Such despair has bloomed in my mind in the past few years as any momentum and collective will we had to address these problems seems to have become whelmed in the expressions of an empire in decline: a flirtation with fascist doubling down on this doomed course, unrest, impotent governing structures eating their own tails, and the whispers of civil war.
Perhaps my attraction to doom comes from from growing up with the looming threat of climate change. One of the long-tried tactics to push for change has been explaining, with greater and greater alarm, the dangers to come if we stay on this course.
What I know is that we need those on the edges: the radicals, the queer, the marginalized, the ones who speak up and remind me of what I’d want to ignore. These are the voices that see we are the Titanic plowing heedlessly into the ice and shouting for us to stop. We need these voices if we’re going to survive the changes that are already happening.
For a time, after the last election, I found my mind jumped to envisioning this future with a terrifying and overwhelming certainty. When talking with folks who I thought were in similar places I would share my fears of civil war and the others would get quiet and uncomfortable, and I felt more alone with my fears and even more afraid.
Now that concerns about civil unrest potentially spiraling into war have become more mainstream—I was able to talk about it casually with a neighbor the other day—I’ve felt freed up from my terror. What I’ve discovered is that, for me, what was most paralyzing is to feel alone with my concerns. When others can listen to my concerns with grounded compassion, together we can appraise the danger realistically and make practical plans to prepare. Then I feel lighter, freer, and better able to act.
Without that—realistic appraisals and making plans—the despair, powerlessness, and rage become overwhelming. When we focus too much on issues that are so big, so encompassing, so beyond our personal power to influence, it is hard to feel anything but those big, defeating emotions. This is, of course, worsened by media that capitalizes on making those emotions big and defeating so that we keep clicking, reading, watching, and consuming to deal with them.
And this is where I’ve begun to imagine “false despair” as a compliment to false hope. Having been so afraid of authoritarian governance, the rise of fascist movements, and the possibility of civil war, the realistic expressions of these tendencies has been unexpectedly grounding.
Which is not saying these experiences are not terrible. The pandemic is a horror and the national response to it is a disgrace on the people who were supposed to be our leaders. Destructive and disgraceful, too, is the deliberate stoking of polarization and the most fascistic impulses of the American people.
The deaths and grief are real. But what has surprised me often for the past four years is the ineptitude. Our would-be fascist was surprisingly bad at his job, which does not mean he’s not dangerous and the consequences of this won’t continue to unfold in harmful ways. The insurrection that stormed the Capitol building included people who had zip-ties, weapons, and incendiary devices clearly aiming for violent action, with calls for murdering elected officials, and also there were a lot of incidental folks who seemed to be swept in and not know what to do with themselves—milling about, breaking and messing with stuff, taking photo ops.
And while all that was happening, I needed to eat lunch and see clients. Life continued.
That paralyzing vision of utter horror and misery has done nothing to help me, and the certainty with which doom prophets make their utterances feels as unhelpful as the blindfolded certitude of the optimism peddlers and spiritual bypassers. Those who need to hear the doom prophecies are those with the power to do something about it. Those of us who are trying to live our lives and create something closer to the ground may need to hear enough of it to motivate us to act and gather power and influence.
What I seek is a path of clear perspective, which requires ongoing discernment and recalibration. Though this coup failed, that does not mean our struggles are over, and my fearful part worries that there are those who watched what happened that will reflect and come up with a better plan in the future. Thank you, fear brain! That’s an important concern. Now let’s finish this blog post.
What I mean to say is, even with that being true—even if somehow those chuckleheads had taken over the government—I would still need to make lunch and see my clients. That is the work of my life, what I am able to do, and the way I can be effective. Writing this blog post, as much as it feels like spitting into the ocean, is nevertheless something I can do.
On a fundamental psychological level, we need to begin acting where we have the most power and influence. It is not powerlessness, rage, and despair that make us effective—those emotions are valid and worthy of care and compassion within ourselves, but we cannot provide that when we’re flooded by them. What we need is to engage with these feelings from a place that is grounded and centered within our own agency—no matter how small or limited that agency may seem, we have access to it.
That story of despair and fatalism—”It’s all going to hell and there’s nothing I can do”—can crush us, or we can look at the piece of truth within it and let it guide us to where we can be effective. Me, the person typing, may have very small influence on the larger movements of history, but I have a great deal of influence on what we do with it. I have influence on my family and community in how we talk about and respond to what is happening, how we plan for what may be coming.
Whatever is coming, when it comes, may have features of what we fear, but it will also be different from what we can imagine. We will still have lives to live, floors to sweep, opportunities for joy and laughter and tears, people we love. There will be loopholes, secret places, and unexpected opportunities for power if we are awake enough to see them.
When you are feeling overwhelmed by despair, rage, or powerlessness, I would invite you to try any or all of the following:
Take a moment to acknowledge you feel this way because you care, and thank yourself for caring. Even if you see yourself as surrounded by a field of monsters in human bodies who care nothing for anyone else, recognize that within you, at the core of despair and rage, is your genuine caring for and love of life, the world, and humanity. It can be a lot simply to stop, take a breath, and acknowledge this. “I acknowledge I would only feel this way if I cared.” If you feel softer, you might try saying, “I appreciate that I care enough to feel this,” or even “I am grateful that I care enough to feel this.” But if you do not feel appreciative or grateful, it is great simply to begin with acknowledgment.
Next, do something for your body. Drink water. Take a nap. Eat some food. Go for a walk or otherwise get exercise that works for your body.
You might do something for your environment, too. Sweep the floor. Make the bed. Wash a dish. Clean anything. Pick up some litter. Don’t make a big, ambitious plan, just pick one thing to do and do it.
Then, you might also do something for your heart. Journal your thoughts and feelings. Draw a picture of how you feel. Talk to someone who can listen without offering advice or judgment.
Finally, you might also do something for your mind. Take time to write or speak out your fears. (Speaking could be to another person or to a voice recorder.) Really put them out as succinctly or clearly as possible. “I am afraid of civil war.” “I am afraid of losing my home.” Then take a break for a bit, and come back to this. Pick one of your fears and spend more time writing out what you think could happen that would make this come true. Once you’ve articulated this, think about what resources or supports you need that would help you plan to survive or offset these risks. Look around and start connecting with those resources, skills, or supports.
For those interested in my work, here are some current ways you can plug in or access more:
My new essay, “Talking to the Gods: Power, Money, Ethics, and Spirituality and Wellness Professions” is now up at Gods & Radicals. It offers some reflections on the messy issues of power and money in helping and spiritual work broadly, and offers some questions and areas of reflection for those who want to assess risk and danger in working with unlicensed or unregulated teachers, coaches, and healers.
The most egregious mystic healers become so enamored of their own feelings of certainty and disciple worship that they feel free and empowered to determine what is true for others. Such power is exerted through giving nonconsensual and invasive “readings” of the people around them, while simultaneously rejecting anyone else’s capacity to read them. In truth, there are also unethical mental-health establishment folks who enact the same kind of power onto their clients through interpretations and aggressive reframing of the client’s problems, who approach therapy from a paternalistic posture that disempowers and infantilizes their clients and may stir up more problems than we settle.
The course I find offers so many practical and accessible skills for times of instability, including foraging, making one’s own food and home remedies, and self-defense skills.
As my private practice remains at my capacity, I have turned my attention toward writing and making courses as a way of disseminating what I offer to be more accessible to folks who do not have the access to work with me one on one. These courses are not a substitute for one’s own therapy, but may be a useful compliment to them:
Crossing the Distance: Embodied Connection and Deep Listening in Telehealth Practice is a workshop that I have offered multiple times since this summer for therapists and other healers who are struggling to feel fully present and connected to their clients while working through telehealth. As the COVID19 pandemic continues, this course has been a rich opportunity to help us find ease, joy, and clinical efficacy in our work even in a medium that may not be our preference.
The Ram & The Scales: The Dance of Interdependence is an online workshop series I am developing that will begin in February 2021. This work emerges from a book in progress that draws upon psychotherapy and the Western esoteric tradition, using the seven classical planets of astrology to organize and deepen the skills of being fully ourselves and connected in authentic relationships with others. The workshops will include a copy of the text, audio meditations, video chats, and a forum for discussion.
It is a blessing to feel inspired to do this work. This year has been hard for me, as it has been for all of us, but something that is a source of resilience and hope for me is to continue to be mindful of what is problematic and painful while also returning my focus to what is generative. There is no single solution to all that ails us, ever, but I also find that simply the act of moving toward desire is itself a transformation of life.
I wish you strength, support, solace, and ease this winter.
“There is something to be learned from a rainstorm. When meeting with a sudden shower, you try not to get wet and run quickly along the road. But doing such things as passing under the eaves of houses, you still get wet. When you are resolved from the beginning, you will not be perplexed, though you will still get the same soaking. This understanding extends to everything.”
There is no escape from the hardships of this time.
That thought keeps coming to me throughout the year as I experience my life and support my friends and clients in the United States. I see that so much of what we turn to for ease, pleasure, relief, or escape has been taken from us or overrun by our problems.
Trying to find a way around it, a way to make things easier, ends up leading back to the problem. Some of us try to ignore the virus and reopen the economy, and it still runs rampant causing long-term illness and death. Some of us judge each other’s choices and try to shame others into getting on board with their protocol, yet people continue to act like people and make choices we think are stupid. Others of us try to just focus on what we can manage and our own risk levels, yet other people’s behavior still impacts our lives.
Even for the luckiest among us, weariness, boredom, and conflict seems pervasive. The veil continues to be pulled back, revealing the mess we are truly in, and with all revelation the urge is to shrink back and turn away. Yet in this time, it seems there is nowhere to turn. We fear being devoured by the distress, and the stress of trying to escape only escalates us.
We can practice accepting and becoming present in the conditions of our life without diving into the devouring pit of our suffering. Our human life is about our bodies anchoring to the ground and our heads opening to the sky. Not to be floating above the earth in a dreamy, untroubled daze, or buried under the weight of suffering. The Buddhist teachings of Pema Chödron speak of this as creative hopelessness or “the wisdom of no escape.”
From my perspective, this is the medicine of Saturn, that mythic-astrological master of discipline, hardship, illness, melancholia, and limitation. It is a dark, bitter medicine. We don’t necessarily like it, it doesn’t feel good, and it helps.
Early in my therapist days I heard the wisdom, “The best way to work through your depression is to doanything.” When everything in your body and soul tells you to shut down, exerting yourself is a balm. You may not be able to shower, but you get out of bed. You may feel dead inside, but you go to work. You don’t have to act like you feel something you don’t—in fact, I think it’s better not to—but you push yourself a little harder than you want.
In a melancholic state, when life feels empty and without point, it is an act of hope and faith to keep tending that life. The hope and faith is that, if you can keep tending the life you have, eventually the depression will end and you will be able to enjoy it again.
The paradox is that, in this state, generally we feel neither hope nor faith. Everything in us tells us with certainty that there is no point. Every activity feels immeasurably harder, and our energy levels so much lower. You could be utterly certain that life is meaningless and you’re a pile of shit, and still decide to feed and walk the dog. That effort is the Saturnian medicine.
In these days, the Saturnian medicine could be wearing a mask even though it’s unpleasant. Having the hard conversations on purpose. Listening to what you do not want to hear. Speaking the truth you are afraid to say. Moving through the entire day sober. Doing a morning spiritual practice, even if it feels empty. Getting dressed for work even if you’re not leaving the house. Eating a salad for lunch instead of totwaffles and syrupchup for the third day in a row.
Such exercise and effort is as much about avoiding or slowing the rate of decline as it is to make gains. After a certain point in life, we may stop exercising with the hope of getting that dream body to impress others. Instead, we may lift weights because exerting ourselves is a kind of joy and affirmation of aliveness. We may lift weights, though it is unpleasant, because doing so means we live with less pain in our backs and more energy during the day.
Turning toward the pain and exerting ourselves are oppositional forces with generative friction. In exercise, my temptation was always to do easy stuff and feel great about how hard I worked without breaking a sweat; or to do really hard stuff and injure myself. Instead, we can find the edge of our strength and tolerance and press gently against it, working to the point of exhaustion and then stopping.
Then, rest. Stop doing. Read a book instead of doomscrolling. Sit in quietude. Go to bed early. See how that goes.
This piece begins with a quote from the Hagakure that I first encountered through the movie Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai. Taken far out of context, it speaks to me of a stoic determination and acceptance of what is that brings with it a certain grace and softness. If we accept that we will get wet, we make available to ourselves the energy and presence that would have been wasted in avoidance and frustration.
