I awoke this morning with a knot in my stomach. Once again, I dreamt of bears. For the third time in two weeks, my sleep was filled with the disparate images of a bear behaving as a human in our very anthropocentric world- a place clearly not created for a bear. The bears in my dreams lumber about, share conversations, order blueberry muffins in coffee shops, drink water from the public fountains, even masturbate in the middle of dinner parties. That was strange, admittedly. The point is, the bears are so outsize that they cannot possibly accomplish these tasks with grace or understatement, yet in my dreams they seem unaware of the unlikelihood, the absurdity of their presence there.
I discovered something last night, over a plastic cup of water in a basement club, staring into the blue, blue eyes of a boy who I think was trying to convince me that we have a mind connection. We might have a mind connection, but right now the gaze of my mind is always directed in: at myself. I am desperately trying to see my way to the core of my unhappiness.
This is what I discovered: self-love is also a balance. Learning to love yourself is a delicate balancing act between loving who you are right now, and striving to become something better, always. C stared at me with his ridiculously blue eyes and I stared into my own heart to find that I have been laboring under a misapprehension. I have been seeking to love myself, as I am in this moment, flaws and all. Yet, to internalize these flaws, to see them as a part of myself, to own them in the way Satir described, I would need to allow them to take residence in my identity permanently. I think this is a point of central conflict between psychology and spirituality. While psychology encourages us to identify and analyze the root of our socially problematic behaviors, spirituality pushes us to release these behaviors entirely. Even the most ghastly and destructive religions offer their followers the hope of penance, forgiveness, or repentance. You can come back to the neutral place, where your Tabula Rasa is once more wiped clean and you can set out with determination to muck it up all over again. Meditation, confession and prayer are the daily reset buttons in many spiritual lives plagued with the flaws and failures inherent to the human race.
After a brief period of renewed optimism and hope, I once again find myself in a state of despair. I want to believe in the anointed path of self-love and self-discovery, but I can’t seem to find the right vehicle to drive. C pushes me relentlessly toward his discoveries, but they are not my own. It is painful to me- his relentless conversions. He uses modal verbs and I use the passive voice. He says: “you must try!” I say: “this way is known to have worked in the past.” He sees everything as a personal process, while I can’t seem to shake the feeling that I’ve tried it all before, and failed. I know I can’t move on until I learn to be comfortable here. I must love myself, just as I am, before I can hope to become better. But there is no path that makes sense to me! Everything is familiar and everything is flawed.
This is the roadblock, and this is the place where the mind connection fails. My gaze is turned in, still straining to understand and appreciate this strange creature of self and finding it always, always impossible to choose a path that isn’t littered with ineptitude. This is also where the bears come in, I believe. Why have I been dreaming so consistently and disturbingly of bears? The bears do perfectly normal human things, but of course not in a perfectly normal human manner. They move about this world, encumbered by their tremendous size and weight, attempting to appear unobtrusive. They do not succeed.
For a long time now, I feel that I have been carrying a tremendous weight around with me. I go through long periods where I try to name this weight, to identify and categorize it- to break it into parts, to discard it. As in psychology, I analyze the weight, looking for sources and root causes. I want to set it down, but instead I keep adding to it, picking things up along my journey of self-discovery. As I push forward to become something more, I take on more and more, but I never set anything down. In this way, I am something of a hoarder. The weight, I believe, might be called identity, and the myriad objects contributing to the whole might be labeled personality. Like a strange gypsy queen, I collect objects of curiosity and stash them away- perhaps not seeing their use at the present time but hoping, hoping always that I might know what to do with it later. And now, like the bears, I am struggling to do typically normal human things in my huge, clumsy body.
I watched Howl’s Moving Castle again recently. I know C's blue eyes saw, but they didn’t necessarily understand. As usual, my own eyes saw only myself reflected in that moving monstrosity: the menagerie of self, cobbled into a castle impenetrable and obscene.
I want to simplify my life. I want to simplify myself. I want to set down some of this weight. I do not have to be all things to everyone in my life. I do not have to call on my various tricks of personality to charm and deflect. This is a truth I used to know intimately. I wasn’t necessarily happy when I was young, but I certainly wasn’t carrying all this weight around. So the task is this: discard what I don’t need. Let things go, and present myself honestly. The honest core of truth is of course the hardest to utter: I don’t know who I am, beneath all of these objects of interest. And so I can’t believe that anyone is truly interested in me. I can’t see myself, obscured as I am, and so how can I (or anyone else) truly love me?
So maybe I’m not ready for a new love, after all. Maybe the mind connection will always falter, because we are both really just trying to see past all the crap stacked around me to my true self. To charm is now so easy for me, I can even charm myself. But to love requires clarity, and this is not something I can’t find anywhere among my objects d’art with which I have attempted to cultivate my identity.
Sunday, November 13, 2011
Thursday, November 10, 2011
Guided Meditation for Self-love and Release of Negativity
Sit in a comfortable position and breathe in deeply. Check to make sure that each part of your body is completely comfortable. Release your feet and calves, upper thighs, inner thighs. Release the muscles of your belly and feel your breath enter there. Everything is soft, everything is still. Release your lower back muscles, let the tension go out of your middle back and solar plexus. Release the tension between you shoulder blades with a deep inhale. Exhale. Relax your eyelids and the skin of your cheeks. Let the area between your mouth and nose be soft. Breathe deeply. Relax the skin of your forehead. Feel your body sinking into the earth. Feel your legs rooted in the ground. Release all tension and stress from the day. Sink deeper. Allow your eyelids to close fully. Concentrate on your breath. Slow, even breaths. Breathing makes you feel calm. The oxygen makes your skin tingle. Feel the warmth spreading to every part of your body.
You are loved by the light all around you. See it through your closed eyelids, feel it on your skin. Breathe the light into your lungs and allow it to fill every part of your being. The light is spreading through your body. Everything it touches it purified. It is flowing through your veins, it is swelling in your belly. The light is spreading down into your legs and out into the very tips of your fingers. Wherever the light touches, all pain is chased away. Breathe in more light, breathe out negative thoughts, old emotions. Your exhaled breath is putrid. See your black, poisoned breath exit your body and mingle with the light all around you. The light cleans it too, and the darkness becomes pure energy. Breathe it in again- welcome your purified emotions and experiences back into your body. They are no longer separate, but simply part of the healing light. The light is the only thing inside you now. Feel the energy in every part of your body. In your toes, in your fingers. In your ears and the skin on the back of your neck. In your heart and your lungs. Everything feels healthy, pure, and peaceful. Breathe.
Now leave your body and hover above, looking down. See your face and lips. See your peaceful, closed eyes and the smooth skin covering your cheeks. See the curve of your breasts as you inhale and the gentle arch of your back. How beautiful you are! How young and healthy!
Re-enter your body and allow gratefulness to seep from every pore of your skin. Breathe in the light and sweat our gratitude. Feel the perfect balance in your body. Breathe in deeply. Take in as much air as you possibly can. It is water and it is love. Exhale. Breathe.
Slowly, when you feel ready, begin to wiggle your fingers and your toes. Move your legs up and down, shrug your shoulders. Feel your body tingling. Tilt your head to the left, and to the right. Touch your chin to your chest and feel the stretch in your neck. Get up slowly, and stretch your whole body. Leave here full of love and light and do only good.
Namaste.
You are loved by the light all around you. See it through your closed eyelids, feel it on your skin. Breathe the light into your lungs and allow it to fill every part of your being. The light is spreading through your body. Everything it touches it purified. It is flowing through your veins, it is swelling in your belly. The light is spreading down into your legs and out into the very tips of your fingers. Wherever the light touches, all pain is chased away. Breathe in more light, breathe out negative thoughts, old emotions. Your exhaled breath is putrid. See your black, poisoned breath exit your body and mingle with the light all around you. The light cleans it too, and the darkness becomes pure energy. Breathe it in again- welcome your purified emotions and experiences back into your body. They are no longer separate, but simply part of the healing light. The light is the only thing inside you now. Feel the energy in every part of your body. In your toes, in your fingers. In your ears and the skin on the back of your neck. In your heart and your lungs. Everything feels healthy, pure, and peaceful. Breathe.
Now leave your body and hover above, looking down. See your face and lips. See your peaceful, closed eyes and the smooth skin covering your cheeks. See the curve of your breasts as you inhale and the gentle arch of your back. How beautiful you are! How young and healthy!
Re-enter your body and allow gratefulness to seep from every pore of your skin. Breathe in the light and sweat our gratitude. Feel the perfect balance in your body. Breathe in deeply. Take in as much air as you possibly can. It is water and it is love. Exhale. Breathe.
Slowly, when you feel ready, begin to wiggle your fingers and your toes. Move your legs up and down, shrug your shoulders. Feel your body tingling. Tilt your head to the left, and to the right. Touch your chin to your chest and feel the stretch in your neck. Get up slowly, and stretch your whole body. Leave here full of love and light and do only good.
Namaste.
Thursday, November 3, 2011
I am a Teacher. I am a Student.
This is a rant about my students. Maybe it is about being a teacher; this identity I still feel unable to fully take on as my own. This is a rant about what my life has become, and the way stress can change forms drastically without ever abating at all. The way weaknesses and insecurities you believed were conquered and in the past resurface with a vengeance that feels like assault. This is a rant about how much I still have to learn.
This month has been extremely challenging for me. My teaching schedule changes every month at my current job, and the rapid turnaround time is brutal. At first, I found it exciting to plan and implement 5 new classes every single month- now I find it exhausting. I feel so worn down and on edge that I am seriously considering taking a whole month off. My body is revolting too- as my muscles tighten up into little balls of fire and my head aches ferociously at the end of every day. Each hour is a carefully coordinated performance and the combination of performance anxiety, show mishaps, and on-stage catastrophes combine to make me feel like a deranged clown most of the time. I am forgetting my lines, missing my cues, and dropping my partner every step of the way. Very few days feel satisfying to me lately, and even less feel rewarding.
I started teaching because I thought I could be creative, and I thought I was good at motivating and inspiring students to learn. I thought I was good at making boring stuff fun, and at recognizing where empathy and compassion were needed. I thought I was good at building relationships with my students, and earning their respect. I thought I was good at teaching them to respect themselves.
Today, I don’t think any of these things are true. I hope I change my mind later. Hope is the mainstay of perseverance. I’ve been in this job 8 months now, and normally I would be looking forward to moving on soon. I would be planning my next destination, pouring my energy and enthusiasm into pulling things together for the move. I would be happy because I would normally be in motion. I am always happiest in motion. In fact, I’m almost never NOT in motion. For seven years, I am always either settling in or setting off. What lies between? I don’t even know.
What lies between right now is despair, self-doubt, and frustration. What lies between is violent thoughts and deep depression. What lies between is doubt, doubt, doubt. I can’t find my footing in this strange space between: the purgatory of staying put.
I don’t think I’m a very good teacher today, because I’m tired of teaching. I am tired of my students. I am tired of their whining, of their endless complaints, of their laziness and their smug little faces- so obstinate in their desire to do anything BUT think. So busy thinking of all the reasons they hate what I’m doing that they don’t have any power left to think about what I’m saying.
My tactic lately is to ask them what they think I could be doing better, and then ask them to do exactly that. This is what my student accused me of today: asking the question “so you think you can do better?” It’s true, I guess. But why is it bad?
Right now, it seems to me that the whole world is hell bent on pointing fingers and condemning others, yet no one has the courage to look for a solution. There are so many things to learn! There are so many problems to solve! There is so much pain to understand and assuage! There is a whole world of suffering begging to be aided by compassion. Yet there seems to be no time and no desire to stop the madness of blame and simply try to understand. Simply try to help. Simply try to offer a little compassion and step out of our trenches long enough to see the beauty of this winter day. There is beauty still! And it is not because someone manufactured it perfectly. The beauty is in the contrast, in the different perspectives. The most beautiful thing is the moment someone says “Look at it this way” and you turn your head or squint your eyes until something commonplace becomes… fucking beautiful. Shockingly beautiful. And then you sit in silence with that beauty and after awhile you maybe, maybe think to turn to that giver of this beautiful thing and say something incredibly beautiful:
“Thank you.”
No one has said thank you to me for a long time now, and no one seems to want what I can give. With all my being, I want to move on, but that is not the lesson of my life right now. That was a lesson of my life. I know how to move on better than most people. I know how to offer compassion in the face of suffering. I know how to let down my defenses and offer help. What I don’t know is how to do any of these things for my own tired, downtrodden soul. I don’t know how to offer myself compassion in a time of suffering. I don’t know how to stay put and stay sane. This IS the lesson of my life right now. But this is a lesson that seems to have no teacher, and which I am baffled at how to learn.
This month has been extremely challenging for me. My teaching schedule changes every month at my current job, and the rapid turnaround time is brutal. At first, I found it exciting to plan and implement 5 new classes every single month- now I find it exhausting. I feel so worn down and on edge that I am seriously considering taking a whole month off. My body is revolting too- as my muscles tighten up into little balls of fire and my head aches ferociously at the end of every day. Each hour is a carefully coordinated performance and the combination of performance anxiety, show mishaps, and on-stage catastrophes combine to make me feel like a deranged clown most of the time. I am forgetting my lines, missing my cues, and dropping my partner every step of the way. Very few days feel satisfying to me lately, and even less feel rewarding.
I started teaching because I thought I could be creative, and I thought I was good at motivating and inspiring students to learn. I thought I was good at making boring stuff fun, and at recognizing where empathy and compassion were needed. I thought I was good at building relationships with my students, and earning their respect. I thought I was good at teaching them to respect themselves.
Today, I don’t think any of these things are true. I hope I change my mind later. Hope is the mainstay of perseverance. I’ve been in this job 8 months now, and normally I would be looking forward to moving on soon. I would be planning my next destination, pouring my energy and enthusiasm into pulling things together for the move. I would be happy because I would normally be in motion. I am always happiest in motion. In fact, I’m almost never NOT in motion. For seven years, I am always either settling in or setting off. What lies between? I don’t even know.
What lies between right now is despair, self-doubt, and frustration. What lies between is violent thoughts and deep depression. What lies between is doubt, doubt, doubt. I can’t find my footing in this strange space between: the purgatory of staying put.
I don’t think I’m a very good teacher today, because I’m tired of teaching. I am tired of my students. I am tired of their whining, of their endless complaints, of their laziness and their smug little faces- so obstinate in their desire to do anything BUT think. So busy thinking of all the reasons they hate what I’m doing that they don’t have any power left to think about what I’m saying.
My tactic lately is to ask them what they think I could be doing better, and then ask them to do exactly that. This is what my student accused me of today: asking the question “so you think you can do better?” It’s true, I guess. But why is it bad?
Right now, it seems to me that the whole world is hell bent on pointing fingers and condemning others, yet no one has the courage to look for a solution. There are so many things to learn! There are so many problems to solve! There is so much pain to understand and assuage! There is a whole world of suffering begging to be aided by compassion. Yet there seems to be no time and no desire to stop the madness of blame and simply try to understand. Simply try to help. Simply try to offer a little compassion and step out of our trenches long enough to see the beauty of this winter day. There is beauty still! And it is not because someone manufactured it perfectly. The beauty is in the contrast, in the different perspectives. The most beautiful thing is the moment someone says “Look at it this way” and you turn your head or squint your eyes until something commonplace becomes… fucking beautiful. Shockingly beautiful. And then you sit in silence with that beauty and after awhile you maybe, maybe think to turn to that giver of this beautiful thing and say something incredibly beautiful:
“Thank you.”
No one has said thank you to me for a long time now, and no one seems to want what I can give. With all my being, I want to move on, but that is not the lesson of my life right now. That was a lesson of my life. I know how to move on better than most people. I know how to offer compassion in the face of suffering. I know how to let down my defenses and offer help. What I don’t know is how to do any of these things for my own tired, downtrodden soul. I don’t know how to offer myself compassion in a time of suffering. I don’t know how to stay put and stay sane. This IS the lesson of my life right now. But this is a lesson that seems to have no teacher, and which I am baffled at how to learn.
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