Anthony Rella, MA, LMHC

Category: Writing

Response: Three Books of Doom
A couple weeks ago, I was on the plane with my copy of Bowling Alone reading a prescient chapter about how the decline of American civic culture and social involvement includes increased mistrust among neighbors and decreased tolerance for talking about differing opinions on political matters. Putnam suggests that this decreased tolerance would imperil democracy, leading to the more shrill and extreme views taking a larger and larger role in American politics. As it happened, sitting next to me was a man reading a book called The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America.
He glanced at the chapter title on my book. “The dark side of social capital?” he asked aloud. Younger me would have awkwardly tried to avoid any conversation whatsoever, but I felt thoroughly called out by the chapter I had just finished, and realized now was the time to practice.
I closed the book to show him the title: Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. “I think we’re reading about similar things.”
He chuckled and showed me his, and then his wife showed me her book, whose title I didn’t quite retain but had a similar theme around the collapse of America.
“A lot of doom!” I said, and for a moment we could laugh together, and share some of our observations and concerns from our own perspectives. What struck me in the moment was the very shared moment of alarm as Americans, the sense that we are in decline, that whatever once united us is dissolving, that it scares and angers us to live through this dissolution, and that we very understandably are looking for something to blame. Having something to blame gives the illusion of control, the possibility that this process could be averted or undone.
Within the same month, these three books became available to me through my local inter-library loan program, so I read them all close together, and they could speak to each other:
- Reeves, Richard. 2022. Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It. Washington, DC, USA: Brookings Institution Press.
- Putnam, Robert. 2001. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. London, England: Simon & Schuster.
- Harari, Yuval Noah. 2015. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. New York, NY: Harper.
Harari’s Sapiens does not appear, from the title, to be a book of doom, and the cover features Bill Gates’s enthusiastic endorsement of what an entertaining book it is, but I found it the most depressing of the three. Putnam and Reeves both trace increased sense of alienation and discontent among American men specifically but also American citizens more broadly, yet they come with a sociological analysis and offer ideas for change.
Harari tells a story of a species—our species—who has throughout its existence managed to decrease biodiversity, damage environments, and become increasingly dependent upon technologies and structures that have extended our lifespans and yet may well continue to decrease the overall quality of those lives. He tells the story of how credit, empire, and capitalism have become the ruling political and economic paradigms and have liberated the individual from the bonds of community, family, religion with a clarity that that I think more Marxists should aspire to emulate. His tone does not struck me as bitter or antagonistic toward these developments, though he’s willing to share the losses and risks of these changes along with the benefits and opportunities they have created.
So the depression came from inside the house, so to speak. Loneliness and the deep need for belonging and connection have become so core to my interests and my life’s work, and each of these books speak to both how hard it is to have those experiences and how our modern life actively works against them without offering anything of substance to replace them with. And I am part of the problem. I see how the conservative drive to protect family, small towns, religious communities are all efforts to hold on to what has given us belonging for centuries. It is also what gave men a role and an identity. Reeves’s Of Boys and Men offers a rather striking suggestion that it has long been understood that a lonely man is a danger to society, because he has nothing motivating him toward prosocial investments of his strengths and energies. It was marriage and children that tamed men, gave them emotional bonds that turned them into good citizens. When that role becomes increasingly unnecessary, we get lonely, angry, violent men.
Neoliberalism offers us a world based on what Harari describes as the state and market liberating the individual. We are free to live our own lives in accordance with our inner sense of self, our identities, and form relationships based on our values and sexual and gender identity. We have the possibility of forsaking the support of family in pursuit of this freedom of self-expression—we can cut off our parents or demand they get on board with loving us, because we have the possibility of existing outside of their support. (Some of us, anyway.) The stability of empire and capitalism, per Harari, further decreases the risk that we will suffer violence at the hands of each other. But suicide, the death of loneliness and despair, continues to rise.
I cannot help but think it’s the absence of human connection, the absence of a role in the world, the absence of stable community that contributes to that suicidality. Putnam speaks about a time in which the workplace attempted to become a social center to encourage their workers to be more productive, more connected to each other, and to feel that sense of belonging. But we all know that’s bullshit. I mean, we have to all know that’s bullshit. The first time I got a job at a place that had a video game console and a pool table I inwardly thought, “If they see me playing either of these they’re going to think I’m slacking and I’ll be out the door.” And indeed I never saw anyone blowing off steam with a first-person shooter or talking about a project over a game of billiards. There is no stability in a workplace community. Loyalty is not incentivized, it is in fact a liability.
Having been in queer, left-wing, activist, and religious spaces for much of my adult life, I often hear about the role these play in giving people a chosen family, a community to offer the belonging they couldn’t get at home. And yet even these communities, we know, are not guaranteed havens of belonging. Community of shared values and shared identity feels really wonderful, there can be profound connection and care, and I continue to marvel at all the ways people come together and support each other. And it can also feel quite precarious. One day, I feel completely on board with my friends’ beliefs. And then something happens, suddenly there’s a new polarization or a shift in attention, and before you know it, it seems like there has been a collective decision on what the right moral stance is today, and if you aren’t already on board it can feel like that belonging is at risk.
Mostly this is true of Internet communities. When you have in-person relationships with people, when you share resources or take care of each other in tangible ways, it becomes a lot harder to discard people with different opinions. We tend to have a more natural inhibition not to get into black-or-white thinking to each other’s faces, but we sure go to all of our friends who agree with us to vent and wonder how we’re going to fix this problem. The phrase I’ve really grown to hate in these communities is “educate.” Like, “I’m going to educate you” or “Don’t make me educate you.” It’s such a power move to basically imply that the other person’s view is coming from ignorance rather than their own principled examination of the situation and arriving at a different conclusion. Then you’ve set yourself up as the beleaguered expert who has to educate and doesn’t have to listen.
But these are all symptoms of the separation that already exists, not the cause. Those educators also have thoughtful perspectives and want to be understood and included in this culture. We’re all trying to create spaces of belonging for ourselves and protect against being exiled and harmed. The couple next to me on the plane had very different politics than I do, and I don’t know what they’d think of my personal life, but for a moment we could connect on a couple things—our shared citizenship of this country, our shared experiences of having lived in Indiana and spent time in Seattle, our shared experiences of being concerned about the future.
All of these, per Harari, are fictitious mythologies that bind us together, and they’re the bedrock of civilization while having no substance whatsoever. Harari is quite dismissive of religion and imaginal communities except insofar as he sees their value in binding people together. But he seems to argue there’s really nothing better or worse between feminism and capitalism, christianity or neoliberalism, so long as enough people buy into the system and the armed gang running their lives. Harari is less of a prescriptivist and more a historian, more curious about how people did things than whether it was the moral thing for them to do.
Reeves, on the other hand, might be considered one of those progressive elites excoriated by my plane companion’s book. Reeves both identifies how cultural and economic changes have disenfranchised men and considers what sociological, political, and economic projects need to be instituted to help men stay a part of the future. He argues that the brains of boys do develop differently from girls’, in ways less overblown than reactionary gender politics would have us see, but also more significantly than left-wing gender blindness would acknowledge. Boys’ well-documented lack of maturity relative to girls is less cultural than biological, he argues, and actually means that boys are doing increasingly worse in school because they cannot keep up with their more mature girl peers. He offers an ambitious, dare I say technocratic intervention to start boys in school a year later than girls, a discrimination that would engender more equality.
What I appreciate most about Reeves’s argument is that he is addressing a hole in progressive politics that he identifies very explicitly: in our efforts to create greater equity, we look to systemic and sociological causes for inequality among marginalized and oppressive groups. We look at how economic and cultural conditions lead to criminality, for example, or how giving girls and women greater economic support and freedom decreases the need for abortions. We avoid blaming the individual and look more at the conditions that cause the behavior. But when it comes to men, they’re just blamed. They just need to do better and stop being toxic. Reeves tries to step back and ask, what if men are just as subject to sociological conditions, and what if we could intervene on a systemic level to change individual behavior?
Putnam speaks to the golden age of American civic culture as being a product of such progressive technocratic innovations, though he is not wholly celebratory of these and acknowledges the skepticism many of us have of data-driven, top-down programs meant to change our behaviors. They’re the same programs that, per Harari, partner with markets to dislocate the individual from our traditional sources of meaning and belonging. The progressive goal may well be to free us from the need for tribal belonging, but as we’ve seen since most of these books were published, the instinct to return to tribe and deep belonging remains. We cannot legislate that out of existence. We cannot shame it out of existence. This instinct may well be the bond of collective care and meaning that we complain are missing from our individualistic modern lives.
When I started reading these books, I thought it might be worth trying to write more responses like these, as a way of generating the all-important content and as a way of helping me engage. Writing is how I engage, digest, and process information. Obviously I think often about doom, loneliness, social disconnection, and culture change. What reading these books together has challenged in me is my nostalgia for an imagined history of hunter-gatherer tribalism or agricultural communalism. Whether the past was better or not, Harari makes a surprisingly persuasive case that it does not matter because it is now impossible to return to an earlier stage of development. All we can do is work with the spirit of the time as it is today, seeing both its gifts and its pains, and find ways to adapt.
June 17, 2024
Variation on a Theme by Marianne Williamson
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”
― Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of “A Course in Miracles”
Our deepest fear is not that we are powerful beyond measure. Our deepest fear is that we are solely burdened with the responsibility to make life work. It is the endless feeling of inadequacy, of not doing enough, of failing in some core way to be big and bright and bold enough that frightens us. We ask ourselves, ‘When is it enough? What is wrong with a quiet walk and hours spent admiring the variations of bark on a tree, its subtle colorations and textures?’ Actually, who told you that accomplishment was your purpose on earth? You are God experiencing herself in the fullness of her being, through your unique body. Your suffocating your soul for the sake of money or attention, reputation or influence does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about constantly striving to be brighter than your neighbor, to be an influencer, to feign superiority of knowledge or insight over someone whose life you could never understand. We are all meant to be kindred, each fulfilling our unique niche in the ecosystem of life. We were born to delight in the body of God who is our mother and the ground of our being. We alone are not meant to save the world; it is everyone’s job to do our little part. And as we let go of the need to dominate at all costs, we stop suffocating everyone else and allow them to breathe for once. As we stop demonizing our fear and accept it as one of many beautiful sensations keeping us vital on this beautiful world, our presence invites the presence of others.
February 16, 2024
Poem: A God Offers the Choice of Three Paths
```
The Path of Will

Arrow’s tip parting air, 
committed velocity 
forsaking origin 
to pierce, utterly change—
even misses leave marks.

The Path of Desire

Hedge of roses, a maze
tempting lost ones to taste
thorns, grasping for blooms,
missing the open path
to satiety’s center.

The Path of Longing

A vast and winding road
beneath starlit expanse
upon which empty hands,
aching, lift in wonder,
and nothing reaches back.
```
November 23, 2022
If You Dislike a Maxim, Make Your Own
After Gertrude Stein
Do for yourself what you persistently do for others wishing they would do for you.
Do for yourself what you persistently wish others would do for you.
Persistently ask of others what you would them do for yourself.
Wish for yourself the persistence of what others do for you.
Persist in wishing for yourself what others would do for you.
Wish others would do what you persistently do for them.
Wish for yourself what you persistently do for others.
Do for your persistent wishes what you do for others.
For others persistently do what you wish for yourself.
For yourself do persistently what you wish of others.
Wish persistently for others while doing for yourself.
Persistently wish others to do for yourself.
Do persistently what you wish.
Wish for others.
Do for you.
Persist.
October 20, 2020
The Temple of Air
I envision a Temple of Air, nestled on the cliff side of a mountain. Great open portals face east, toward the rising sun, allowing that light to filter into the spare, open space inside. It is a temple of stone and tile through which the wind sweeps constantly. Crisp and chill, a bracing cold that keeps one awake and alert.
Near the portals are poles of planted prayer flags and wheels inscribed with symbols and words wishing fo calmness, spaciousness, and consciousness. As the wind flutters the flags, spins the wheels, he prayers blow like dandelion seeds into the wider world. Wind chimes clank and chime in never-ending and never-repeating music.
The temple gates bear the inscription: “The sky is the mind of the earth.”
On clear days, one can see the span of mountain ranges and valleys surrounding. The sun’s rays are sharp and well-defined. At night, stars are brilliant, deep, and dense, instilling wonder at the bigness of the world. The source of light is visible.
Other days, fog fills the temple. The light always shining from the sky becomes obscured and refracted, its source diffused. A dense gray sky where light is everywhere and nowhere, and nothing is clear. Instead of expansive wonder the pilgrims and priests of the temple feel smothered, bound up inside.
In the eaves, birds make their nests. One can sit in observation as they go out into the world to gather food and materials and return to sustain and nurture their offspring.
One does not go to the Temple to be taught a truth. The Temple itself is the teaching. As one polishes the mind, cleansing it of garbage information, beliefs, and constricting ideologies—so too pilgrims spend time cleaning the bird shit off the ground. Sweeping away detritus carried in by wind and visitors of the human or animal variety. Mending and washing the prayer flags.
Fluttering dreams, by John T, courtesy of Unsplash
The priests of the temple walk with an aloof demeanor, and yet equanimous in their kindness. They look upon all with the same curiosity and warmth, whether murderer or charity-worker. While some say these priests become refined contemplating tree and branch, others say they pick up the blade and practice a martial art both beautiful, precise, and deadly. To watch them dance in conflict, however, is as to watch a leaf fluttering through the air—always spiraling out of reach, evading capture, exhausting opponents through evasion and a light, effortless body.
There is a center in which one sits in meditation, surrounded by invisible movement made known by the cacophony of sound and brilliant flapping textures. A place for things to come and go, to be known, to be prayed, to be sought, and to be revealed.
One might see eagles soar across the mountains, almost unreal in their capacities from the vantage of the primate pilgrim. Yet at one point or another, once these creatures have accomplished their aim, they come to rest. To live too much in the air would afford little time for rest, little to eat. Earth’s gravity calls the creatures back to its touch, for the briefest contact and exchange of energy. Birds build their nests on the ground, where they can create new life, new possibilities, allow those younglings to grow strong before pushing them back into the demands of air.
In one corridor of the temple are narrow passageways that cause intense gusts of wind to blow one about. These rigid portals and passages have labels: “shoulds,” “expectations,” “stories.” The pilgrims encourage each other to, at least once in their visit, walk this corridor. They spread rumors that experiences of exquisite beauty, ease, and celebration lie on the other side of the corridor. Attempting to cross, one finds one’s self quickly confounded by the redirecting intensity of wind. Going forward, a gust pushes rightward. Turning to the right, a gust blows one back. Turning leftward, the wind spins around until the pilgrim finally finds a respite at a calm portal, only to despair in realizing that this was the entrance where they had started. Having gone nowhere, they are exhausted.
In a corridor of the opposing wing is an orchard of trees, whose thick intertwined branches slow and steady the flow of wind. Pilgrims may climb upon them or rest beneath them, feeling the strength of the trees engendered by years of yielding and repairing the damage of yielding to strong gusts. Their rootedness, their connected community offers a deep, powerful grounding of the powers of air.
Another enclave, a butterfly garden, allows the pilgrim to experience the wondrous vision of fluttering beauty that one must simply admire and wait in the hopes that it will alight upon one’s head or outstretched hands. Those pilgrims too eager to catch the wonder find themselves either empty-handed or, worse, with a beautiful creature squashed within their fingers.
Twice a day the temple becomes illuminated with solar light, radiating from the ground and activating mirrored surfaces on the ceilings, the pinwheels, bathing the temple in rainbows and vibrating bright, beautiful light. With this warm, orange glow, myriad arcane symbols appear inscribed in shadow along the ceilings and walls, suggesting a mystery. For early pilgrims, this illumination is a mystery. Those who have spent time dwelling and meditating in the Temple, however, eventually discover the secret.
For there are stairs that spiral beneath the Temple into a narrow cylinder. Descending, pilgrims pass a huge chunk of hanging quartz rock semi-circumscribed by openings cut through the rock to expose the sky outside. Beneath the rock is a sitting place upon which one can look upwards and see the Temple through its floor. What was translucent tile now appears to be clear glass, and from the still, quiet depth the pilgrim quietly watches the active, energetic, fluttering actions above. The riot of colors and vibrations, the movements of birds and pilgrims, all that excitement simply moves and occurs while the observant pilgrim watches.
And, for those lucky pilgrims there when the sun’s ascent or descent meets those cut openings—when the light penetrates the cylinder—that quartz rock becomes illuminated with the sun’s rays. For brief moments, before the rock becomes too dazzling to look at directly, the observant pilgrim might believe that rock has been hewn into the shape of a heart. The bright, brilliant heart of the temple, illumined by the truth of the sun, glowing so brightly that it warms and lights the entirety. If the pilgrim dared to look and risk blindness, they could see the symbols inscribed in the translucent tile floor of the Temple, the symbols cast by this light upon the space above.
Perhaps you, too, will come visit the Temple of Air and speak to the humans and creatures who partake of its wisdom. Perhaps they will tell you their secrets, the insights gifted to them in their work of listening, observing, seeking to understand.
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May 22, 2018
Something Beautiful is Happening Today
Photo by Jaie Miller on Unsplash
Awake. Tongue tracing crisp
contours of air. Skin warmed,
eye illumined, red and green
cells fueled by the teacher
of generosity, whose passion
daily enters our world, meets
the land, generates newness.
Though your tears blur light
into halos, new needles green
from pine. Your breath offers
another chance to love, though
a thicket of thorn encircles you
and the brush of softness causes
your teeth and fists to clench.
The land is an altar upon which
to dedicate your bones to joy.
The wind gathers your tension
from the effort of forcing sense
upon the mystery of another day.
The river whispers the victory
of yielding, leading you to dark
space beyond any lover’s touch—
the relentless play of the heart.
July 4, 2017
On Wisdom
This space has lain silent, though it continues to speak with the archives of posts. Blogging was useful to me as a discipline of creating something weekly and putting it in front of an audience, of believing in my words and my process of exploration enough to make it available to anyone with an Internet connection. How many people clicked on the posts mattered less, though some posts were surprisingly popular and I continue to be pleased with how often my Jungian Beyoncé writings continue to get clicks. This past year, however, I felt less passion about blogging.
Ouranos, photo by Antigone059
When I think about the Internet, I think it is in some ways a venue to observe our collective consciousness. One can read one’s Facebook feed and see the “trends” of thought and conversation, the dialogues that seem fixed, the outraged responses and the outraged responses to the outraged responses. I associate this with the astrological meaning of the planet Uranus, with its associations with community, intellectual debate, and revolutionary thinking. Astrological Neptune is association with the ocean, the spiritual realms, dreams, illusions, and in my view the collective unconscious. In Greek myth, Ouranos is castrated by Kronos (Saturn), and his phallus thrown into the ocean (Neptune), which results in the birth of Aphrodite (Venus).
My interpretation is that the potency of our airy, conscious discourse is lost when we are unable to sink into the oceanic depths and connect with the unconscious influences there. Love makes possible, and is made possible by, the joining of our rational and irrational minds. And here I’m lost in airy analysis when I’m trying to say that I become weary by the constant dialogue and analysis made possible by the Internet. It’s exciting and feels important, it spurs anger and the desire to write and communicate, and at the same time it can be lacking in depth. We are at a point where it is possible for an event to happen in the world and less than two hours later have five different opinion pieces about why the event happened and what it means about us as people. There is not time for deep reflection and integration in which we can say something truly original, something that would truly move our conscious conversation forward. Instead we are reacting to each other based on the assumptions we already have.
Therapy is like that. I’ve come to notice that “analysis” often happens too early and ends up being a rehash of assumptions we’ve already made, the assumptions that created the situation. “I’m feeling uncomfortable. It’s because I don’t like my job.” That has some truth, and yet that does not move us toward anything. We learn nothing new about the discomfort and we get no insight into what might change that would make the work experience better. What helps move forward is to sit with our discomfort, to try to listen in a new way, to notice the stories we always tell and acknowledge that maybe they’re not the entire truth. Maybe these assumptions are dried leaves of our mind that need to be shed so that we can lay bare and fallow for a time, being with that emptiness and not-knowing, to make space for something truly new to grow from within us.
—-
I’ve written all of this and noticed that I titled the post “On Wisdom,” because I thought to say more about the oddness of the rhetorical box I’ve created for myself with this blog. I’ve enjoyed writing about therapeutic process and trying to communicate psychological insights in ways that are fresh, accessible, yet challenging to pop psychological assumptions that I think are unhelpful. At the same time I’ve not appreciated how this platform and that approach necessarily narrows the scope and loses nuance. What I have learned as a therapist is that every person needs to hear something different, even if their problems look superficially the same. We are all on a unique trajectory of growth and have unique histories that shape that growth. One person needs to hear, “You are not your symptoms. It is time to live the life you want even if it doesn’t feel right.” Another person needs to hear, “What you are experiencing is not your fault. You have an illness that is out of your control.” For both of these people, one message would be liberating while the other message would be a cage.
Or, in other words, there is a story about a Buddhist master and a student. The student comes to the master to complain. “Your advice is contradictory. You tell me to do one thing one day, and the opposite the next.”
The master nods. “Imagine that you are standing at one side of a bridge that has no rails, and you are helping a blind person to walk across it. When the person veers too far to the edge on the right, you yell, ‘Go left!’ When the person veers too far to the left, you yell, ‘Go right!’”
My intellectual focus on opposites, polarities, and dualism is in this spirit. My hope is to help people find their own Middle Way, which necessitates recognizing and accepting the opposites within us. This is so simple to write but in practice there is not a set of consistent, reliable codes to follow. Yet writing blog posts, I struggle to represent that, as often the topic of a blog post is “How to go right when you’re veering too far to the left,” which may be terribly bad advice for the people veering too far to the right. I could become more complex, but then my blog posts would be like this one, approaching 1,000 words, and thus unlikely to be read or shared by people on their lunch breaks.
—
All of this to say: I have ended my practice of weekly blogging for now, and have returned to writing longer essays and fiction to encourage me to reflect more deeply, research more, and think more critically about what I want to say.
October 14, 2015
Poem: This maddening itch in my heart is like–
This maddening itch in my heart is like–
by Frank Vincentz
- poison woven into tissue,
  sepsis radiating from the site
  where unspoken words putrefy
  in anger and hope, toxifying
  blood, anxious for salve.
- dreams and wishes withering
  under reality’s hot sun, lost;
  an empty hole in a brick wall
  betraying its completion;
  absence yearning for touch.
- desire unnamed, the chafing
  of which tears the hole wider,
  fraying thread and loosening
  buttons until the entire fabric
  compels thorough refashioning.
- a deep wound beginning to heal,
  pain throbbing and dissolving
  per some strange rhythm, work
  which scratching would undo,
  requiring patience, toleration.
July 28, 2015
forgetting a home you’ve never known
The Spirit of Phinney Ridge
Children
you are alien
upon me,
travelers pausing,
eating the flesh
of other lands,
drinking the water
of other streams,
wearing the skin
of other herds,
ignorant
of the names
of my beasts
and leaves.
You circle
without end
forgetting
a home
you’ve never
known.
What you imagine
among the stars
dwells within
this space.
Align to me,
orient
to the shadows
cast upon me.
Dissolve
your fences.
Root down
in my soil,
my sorrow,
my dark soul.
Feed from me,
sleep in me,
love on me,
surrender
your dead
to me.
Nourish me
with tears
and blood,
lay words
like stones
upon my back.
Be chilled
by my grief,
warmed
by my laughter.
There is no I
apart
from you.
Join your eye
to mine.
– A. Rella
May 28, 2015
Layers of Being Within the Moment
“I’ve got nothing to say.”
This is a mental habit, an automatic thought that arises when it’s time to sit down to write. Another automatic thought is “I don’t know,” which has a far more expansive field of meaning—“I don’t know” arises in response to many questions and demands.
On another layer is the emotional quality of feeling stuck, feeling stifled somehow, suggesting another truth. Some part of me felt the wish to show up to writing, and if there is a longing to write, there must be something to say. Yet that urge to express something has met with the leaden habit of resistance, “I’ve got nothing to say.”
The anxiety that emerges is, in my observation, often what happens when resistance blocks energy seeking expression. Anxiety is the longing to act rubbing against a refusal to act. If the longing cannot overcome the refusal, anxiety grows larger and more intense, or burns down into a dull depressive flame. Energy wants to move.
On another layer is the physical experience of standing here at my desk, looking at the screen, feeling the keys under my fingers, noticing those feelings of anxiety and stuckness. Somewhere in my gloriously biological brain, synapses are firing and moving closer together, braided into a new configuration, a complexity that yields new insight and activity. For whatever reason, as a human, I am not content with the contents of my brain. Some drive seeks to forge new connections, prune connections that lead to suffering, to find a new truth amidst the information my senses constantly receive.
The Ba (Soul) Returning to the Corpse
On another layer is what might be called the soul, the Self, the psyche, a part that is highly contested and difficult to find if you’re looking for it. This part seems a totality that is and is separate from the whole. When I dream, my waking mind’s rigid habits of thought relax and my mind’s eye opens to how this part of me, this psyche, perceives the world: A symbolic, non-rational, and profoundly deep and complex experiencing. It is here, I think, that the impulse seeking expression has its origin. Here are the muddy roots, the nourishing dark decay.
The mind is an expert organizer and manager, and the psyche is fertile chaos, an uneasy partnership. Disconnected from its roots, the mind becomes enamored of its own rationalizations. Our stories harden and our beliefs about ourselves and the world become fixed. Often these stories and beliefs are the strategies we use to manage or avoid these deeper experiences that threaten to overturn the mind’s certainty.
We think we are engaging in intellectual discussions when we are really arguing because we feel judged or unsafe and the emotional part of us is closing down. We ignore emotions that are not what we think we should feel. We engage in habits of thought and action that shut us down, block our self’s expression, and sometimes actively hurt us because our mind believes these habits are necessary for survival.
We can liberate the mind and sink deeper into the Self. We can become skeptical of our own rationalizations and stories, and we can look to what emotions lie beneath, what bodily sensations, what stirrings of the soul. We can allow room for the non-rational, those images, practices, or beliefs that are mind cannot easily contain and integrate. We need these experiences to keep ourselves from becoming stuck and blind in our mind’s self-perpetuating cycle. We need the things we do not understand to invite us to continue going deeper, forging those new connections, seeking what lies beneath.
November 5, 2014