Anthony Rella, MA, LMHC

Tag: psychospiritual

  • An Inventory of Dead and Living Language

    An Inventory of Dead and Living Language

    Lately I have been taking inventory of my beliefs, my ideals, and my guiding philosophies. One focus of reflection is language that once felt vital and inspiring but now feels dead, or at least murky. Words like “health,” “liberation,” and “manifestation,” once felt so vibrant. After years of repetition, mission creep, and marketing campaigns, I no longer know what they mean to me.

    An image of pink flowers, some blossoming and some rotting.

    All of these leaves grow from a living tree, and my hope is to find the vitality at the source of the tree. At times I doubt there is a tree at all. At other times, I feel the tree with such vitality and urgency that it sends me back out into the world fighting and laughing. But I can confuse the leaves with the tree, which becomes problematic when the leaves grow dry. Are they shriveled dry leaves ready to be shed, or are they simply needing more light and water to be renewed?

    Health and Wellness

    These words feel increasingly like knives, like “shoulds.” They are judgment words pointed to promote a political or marketing agenda. There’s no coherent philosophy or objective measure to use in assessing health. A culture war, rather, rages around definitions of health. Is it healthy to take pills or supplements? To be vaccinated or to drink your own urine? What attitudes and behaviors are healthy? Is it healthy to eat a high-fat diet or a carb-heavy diet?

    The etymological root of “health” is wholeness, making it a synonym for integrity. These days I think “health” is measurable by our values, goals, and behavior. We can be healthy with chronic disease, if we accept the disease and what must be done to live as close as possible to the life we want. We can be healthy in accepting our limitations and giving up the life we thought we wanted. We can be healthy in working to be less limited. But that’s a very psychotherapist-y view of health.

    Manifestation

    Once this word conveyed a world of magic: to manifest something that before did not exist. We could manifest spirits, books, special objects, relationships. These days, I mostly see the word on social media advertisements about manifesting lots of money or markers of success and status. It’s implicitly I-centered, as though the one who makes manifest is the elevated one who does things to the world to get manifestations. In that realm of thinking, the elevated individual, lies this increasingly disturbing rhetoric about other people being “bots” or “NPCs” with no subjectivity of their own.

    What feels vibrant in the term is the sense of participating in the world and being in relationship with larger forces. I’ve never loved the term “co-create” though the concept is useful—it’s just a word that doesn’t feel flowing to say or write. Yet it’s approaching what I think is true. Whatever is manifested arises from a field of relationships in which you are only one ingredient. To make a beautiful wooden sculpture manifest, I could have the money to buy it—that’s the easy way—or the blade and the skills to carve one from good wood. But I don’t create the sturdy branch from which I carve the sculpture—that was manifested by the tree. And I don’t possess the spirit that inspired me to discover the sculpture within the branch, that emerges in a flash from beyond, or from the dance of skill, blade, and wood.

    Liberation

    When I first learned about liberation theology movements in high school, the word “liberation” had so much edge and potency. Using the teachings of Jesus Christ to validate direct action and the resistance of political violence, disenfranchisement, and oppression. It’s become a central word in my spiritual practice, comparable to “enlightenment” in its expression of a state of spiritual realization that comes from diligent work.

    Yet these days the word feels not so much dead as murky and conflicted. What warrants the word? Is it middle class white liberal self-serving to use the word “liberation” for my own spiritual and therapeutic practice? Does it diminish those fiercer forms of liberation?

    When I think of liberation, I think of consciousness and agency. We are laden with cultural conditioning, habit, political oppression, and economic exploitation. All of these, to very different intensities, encourage us to live quiet, unconsidered, asleep lives of bare survival. Bringing the light of awareness into this domains, waking up to their realities, and seeing the potential within that has been compromised by these forces makes the work of liberation possible. What feels liberatory is having more power, more choice, the will and capacity to influence the conditions of our lives according to our personal and collective wills.

    Quitting nicotine use could be a smaller liberatory act. It requires looking at my conditioning and habit and creating a space of awareness that makes choice possible. It divests my energy and money from the people who profit off my actions and makes it available for whatever else I wish to do. Going on strike seems a bigger liberatory act in demonstrating the power of the group and using it to set the terms of your labor. The work of creating autonomous spaces within oppressive regimes would be a much larger kind of liberation.

    Aliveness and Vitality

    These words feel the most fresh and intriguing. Aliveness and vitality convey a subjective feeling of being in the world that is a step beyond awareness. For a long time, my work on awareness and consciousness was in the employ of scared parts of me that resisted aliveness. One of my counseling mentors used the word “aliveness” for one of her consult groups, and then I began practicing Aikido, where we occasionally speak of the aliveness in our practice. The word kindled a fire within me and scared me. Being alive is quite vulnerable. You have so much at stake and so much to lose that’s not hidden behind veils of distraction and numbness.

    But also it makes life so much sweeter, so much more satisfying, and in a paradoxical way it makes life easier to lose. What I notice is those who are most afraid of death also tend to avoid aliveness. The fear of losing everything is so great that they avoid having anything worth losing. Yet the people who seem most alive to me take in more nourishment, and seem to have an easier time accepting the little and larger deaths that come with living. Losing is less scary because there’s a confidence that they can get more of what they need. Losing is less scary because they’ve delighted in eating as much of the apple as they could, and the rest is a gift to the earth.

  • On Discernment

    At last summer’s Many Gods West conference in Olympia, Washington, I offered a workshop on discernment. In my spiritual communities, discernment is valued highly, yet I found few descriptions of how to engage in a discernment practice. One of the benefits of discernment is its cultivation of inner authority, so it is helpful that there is no “one true way” of discerning. I wanted to offer a practice and context to help people begin or deepen their own discernment.

    This blog post is a very concise summation of my talk and includes a link to a recording of a meditation I led. If it is not clear already, I will speak of discernment as a psychospiritual practice. As you will see, I believe it is a useful practice for those who do not have a theistic or spiritual orientation. In this post, however, I will be including the spiritual dimension.

    Discernment, according to Etymonline.com, comes from Old French and Latin roots and has connotations of sifting and separation. During my talk, I defined discernment as “judging without being judgmental,” and a participant approached me and pointed out the usefulness of the sifting metaphor to clarify the meaning behind that. When panning for gold, one sifts through the ore to separate out the desired mineral. The discarded ore is not “bad,” it simply does not pertain to the desired goal.

    A discernment practice, then, cultivates our inner authority to tease apart the meaning of experience, to separate what is beneficial to our values and desires from what is not.

    An image of a series of circles that flow into each other. The "Experience" circle points to "Meaning," which points to "Action or Choice," which points to "Outcome." "Outcome" points back to "Meaning," and is linked to "Experience," as "Outcome" and "Experience" are essentially the same phenomena.
    Image Description: A series of circles that flow into each other. The “Experience” circle points to “Meaning,” which points to “Action or Choice,” which points to “Outcome.” “Outcome” points back to “Meaning,” and is linked to “Experience,” as “Outcome” and “Experience” are essentially the same phenomena.

    This image offers a conceptual model, drawing upon cognitive-behavioral models of experience and cognition, to help us discuss the practice of discernment. We all have Experiences, which are essentially neutral occurrences that of themselves do not have meaning. For example, an experience might include:

    1. Having a strange twinge in your shoulder
    2. Reading a friend’s Facebook post
    3. Having a dream in which your deity communicates with you.

    Meaning is what we understand about our Experience. This includes the pre-existing beliefs we have about ourselves and the world; our mood; the political climate; the weather; our previous interactions with others.

    1. If I’ve had that twinge in my shoulder before, for example, and then threw my back out, that might influence the Meaning I make of the shoulder-twinge. “Uh oh.”
    2. If I had a fight with my friend last night, that might shape the Meaning. “This post is about me!!!!!”
    3. If I ascribe to a religious framework that discourages people from believing that gods can communicate directly, that might form the Meaning. “This is just a strange dream, or a misleading one.”

    The Meaning we make of the Experience leads us to make a Choice or take Action.

    1. “I’d better get a massage and see if I can avoid another back issue.” or “Oh, that twinge just lasted for a second and went away, I’m going to ignore it.”
    2. “I’m going to post an angry, passive-aggressive response to this post!” or “It’s unlike my friend to be passive aggressive, I’m going to call and see if we’re cool.”
    3. “I’m going to ignore this dream.” or “Maybe my god is talking to me, I’m going to follow the dream’s suggestions.”

     

    An image of a thick mist, through which a town seems to be peeking. Photo by John Chavez.
    An image of a thick mist, through which a town seems to be peeking. Photo by John Chavez.

    Whatever Action we take (and inaction is an action), what happens next is the Outcome, which either reinforces our Meaning or challenges it.

    1. If I get the massage and still throw my back out, I might question my understanding of the shoulder twinge.
    2. If my friend tells me I’m overreacting, I might question a lot of things about my experience or the friendship.
    3. If I follow the dream guidance and have an amazing experience, I might start to believe (or believe more deeply) that my god can talk to me via dreams.

    Meaning moving into Action is where we practice Discernment. Too often we accept our premises of Meaning so rapidly that we take unconsidered or damaging actions. Alternately, we might divest our power of Meaning-making or Meaning-seeking by deferring to an outside authority.

    Meaning is a deeply Existential concept, and to break it down in a blog post would be ill-advised. To keep things simple, I look at Meaning as beginning with my personal experience—the thoughts, emotions, and sensations I have, my history and personal associations—and then widening it out to larger circles of Meaning. Wider circles include political meanings, cultural messages, spiritual beliefs, and so forth.

    St. Ignatius of Loyola, a Jesuit priest, developed a practice he called “discernment of spirits” after a long convalescence from illness. Essentially forced to spend hours with himself, Ignatius began observing the thoughts he had, and noticing that each thought engendered a feeling in his body. He began to categorize the feelings according to his own theological framework. To be very simple, some thoughts come from God and some from Satan, and he believed one could discern the origin of the thoughts by observing the quality of feeling.

    For those of us who do not subscribe to dualistic religion, this framework is not useful. I acknowledge P. Sufenus Virius Lupos of Aedicula Antinoi for noting that this dualism might negatively influence how people in other traditions view discernment. We may need to take some time to name and define the possible influences upon us so that we can practice more effective discernment, engaging in what Anomalous Thracian calls “the three Ds“: distinctions, differentiations, and definitions.

    I believe that Igntatius’s approach has merit, and have created a version inspired by his. I have included a fifteen-minute recording of the Discernment meditation. It begins by getting us deeply grounded in our bodies, and then invites us to observe our thoughts and notice the feelings they engender. In part two, I invite you to call to mind a spiritual teacher or other influential person in your life, to call their thoughts and actions to mind and observe the feelings they engender. In part three, I invite you to contact a spiritual ally and invite them to send you a message, so you can sense how that contact feels in your body.