I was talking to a friend this morning. She feels she isn't doing enough to find a job, not sending out enough resumes, or making enough calls. Well, I said, sometimes you actually aren't doing enough, but other times you're too much on your case. It's a fine line.
I thought about all the times I've teetered on that line. Usually, like my friend, the line is between: am I doing enough or do I have unrealistic goals and am''''' too much on my case? I can be doing something important to me, like writing, or something I wish I never had to do, like vacuuming, or just about anything at all, and I often get the feeling that the writing isn't deep enough or the vacuuming not complete enough. Is that right, or am I suffering from a perverse perfectionism, the kind that tells me everything I do falls short of some imagined, abstract standard buried deep inside.
There are other times when I teeter on the line because I have a decision to make. Should I walk away from this man because we've gone past the point of no return, or should I stay and try to work things out? Would it be better to leave this town where things never quite work out, or stay and try harder? My busy worried mind can come up with reasons for either side. So I remain teetering, caught by ambivalence in an anxiety of doubt.
And this despite my knowing by now that the problem isn't so much the relative merits on each side of the line - although they're important, too - it's ambivalence itself, a very old pattern, almost my default position. I learned to doubt myself as a child and that doubt has carried forward and still undermines the adult I am. It's the issue behind the issue. And I know my ego can convince me of anything, and then a moment later the reverse. I know that desire, self-interest and willfulness all cloud my view. It's easy to blame them, because I know they are very real, but knowing all that doesn't stop me from choosing one thing and quickly thinking the other is what I should really do. I teeter on the line.
What will help me act despite my ambivalence? What will give me the courage to get off the fine line. Many insights about my ego, fear and doubt have helped me chip away at. But there's something else. Actual change comes when I go deep inside, as deep as the ambivalence is. I have to sit with it, feel it and embrace it. I have to surrender my guilt that I have it, my despair that I can really change. The only way I've found to do that is to get quiet and try to clear my mind. To meditate. All through the day, I can take deep breaths and feel the expansiveness a clear mind brings. Eventually, I see that one side of the fine line emerges as the one I want to choose. I find the courage to act because experience has taught me that there aren't any mistakes, the kind that I thought would doom me or plunge me into the abyss. There is only what I do and choose, and if it doesn't work out disaster wont' come because I know there is a refuge inside me that will never let me down.
My ambivalence used to be a giant ball filling the sky but step by step I've brought it down to size until it's so small I can put it in my pocket, look forward and walk on.
For the last few days, the negative voices in my head have been very loud. It's the usual litany: it's too late, what's the point, you aren't good enough. By this time I know those voices don't describe reality; they aren't connected to any "truth." I know that I can detach, put space around the voices, distance myself so I can have a different perspective. I'm aware it's possible for the world to look very different if I turn my vision just a few degrees, lift it up to that place beyond my shame and fear.
But there are days, like the last few, in which I'm powerless over the voices of my despair. They produce feelings in me - oppressive, debilitating - and I can't rouse myself to act in spite of them. They have me in their grip and action, any action feels beyond me.
I no longer think something will happen or I'll come across the magic formula and somehow days like this will never come again. It may be my metabolism or genes or a hard childhood - whatever the reason, I accept that sometimes I stumble into, if not the abyss, then onto the stairway leading down into it.
The question is how to get through. One way is to keep repeating to myself things I know that push back the negativity: reminding myself it isn't "real," it's only a part of me, a part I can bring down to size; other feelings are possible if I turn away from the mesmerizing voices that want to bring me down. I can look for the places despair sinks down into my body, focus on them until I feel it dissolve away. I can close my eyes and look for the place of letting go. I can reach out to the benevolence I believe exists outside myself. I can try to connect.
The answer is always spiritual. I can act as if I'm not bogged down in the muck but it never gets me very far. Just as you can't cook a stew until you light the gas, so I can't get up and do until I feel deep in my body the connection to a power, a force greater than myself. Even to search for it is to begin to find it and although I may have to take minuscule steps I can be headed in the right direction.
My spirit wants to move that way. I want to be free.
Writing these words has made me feel better. They come from deep inside me. They move me toward connection.
I've been feeling gratitude all day for how far away I've come from fear, what I call my terminal self-consciousness, second guessing my choices, being on my case so much more than off it, and many other things that were keeping me from feeling equanimity - at least from time to time. Fear made me a block of ice, unable to melt enough to learn something new. I didn't know it, but I was looking for faith, some hope that there was a benevolent force in the universe that wanted me, would help me, to be all right.
My fear was an unchanging oppression but faith was not. Faith grew and for every inch it gained, fear lost an inch as well. Slowly, growing faith brought my fear down to size, until I was able to find the courage to soften, to become receptive, to take the risk of surrendering so that something else, aside from me, could come in and help me change. I began to experience for myself the power of spiritual principles - powerlessness and surrender, faith and courage, belief in something beyond myself, that benevolent power for change.
No wonder I'm often flooded with gratitude. I've found the path to peace and acceptance even though sometimes it takes me a while to get there. When I feel gratitude, I'm thinking about all I have, not what I don't have. Gratitude comes out of the deepest part of me and fills me with love for the world. It has the expansiveness, the grandeur of deep connection to the world. I call it the aristocrat of emotions.
I had an appointment for an out patient surgical procedure this morning. I was nervous and used the twenty minute wait to meditate to calm myself down. Suddenly, I remembered years ago when I had a biopsy and felt much was at stake. I was in the changing room in a state bordering on panic. I was trying to breathe in and out when an image came to.
It was a ring of low stones. I see them very clearly, granite chiseled into rectangles embedded in the soil about six inches high. A voice came, "Step out of your fear. Step out of your fear." I closed my eyes and pictured myself slowly slowly slowly stepping beyond the circle of rocks, onto the cool grass. When I opened my eyes, in a miraculous way, my fear was gone. Whatever will be, will be; I'm ready for anything. The biopsy was positive and there was a long process in front of me, but that was the first and only time I felt panic coming on.
Over the years I've returned to the image of the stones whenever I'm facing something that makes me nervous. It's a primitive image, a miniature Stonehenge, and it comes from a deep place. Some would call it grace. I don't know. But I believe it comes from the deepest part of me, the part that wants to survive, to transcend my fear, to be all right.
What happened in that changing room still astonishes me. Fear came up and claimed me and I felt powerless, my being taken over, and yet the stones emerged and I obeyed the voice and stepped outside of my fear. In only a few moments, I was in a different place. I don't know how consciousness shifts in this way, but I know it can. I can't always quickly step out of fear and doubt and the signs which say, No. Sometimes, I have to picture the stones many times. But I know it's possible to move the fear, I know it from my own experience, and that is everything.
Over the years, I've had many images of surrendering. One of the first was that I was a rat in a maze, frantically searching for the way out, when all I had to do was stop and the exit sign would appear.
"...all I had to do..." That's the hardest thing to do, to get to the moment when I fall to my knees in defeat, and in that falling find myself in a new place where change and answers can come. A place where I am willing to surrender all the manipulations of my ego, my expectations and demands, my certainty that there is only one right way for me to live and I can't live without achieving it. Willing to surrender the belief that only I can and should be the sole creator of my destiny.
Life would be much easier if there was a step by step guide to liberating surrender. Although I've come to that point many times, I can't say exactly what gets me there. All surrenders follow a similar path - I hold on and hold on until I can't do it anymore, then I let go and stillness comes. But I never am able to hurry it along; I can't say, oh, I need to surrender, and then simply do it. My desire to surrender doesn't help me surrender any more easily or quickly.
But once I directly experienced what a relief it is when I do surrender, I began to develop faith that if I kept trying to get free of my frantic will, my desperate demands and expectations, I would be led where I wanted to go. I began to see that the bubbling cauldron of fear and doubt and self-loathing that was reaching fever pitch wasn't my fate, wouldn't shatter me, but was part of a process leading me to insight and possibility. More and more, that bubbling cauldron had a context, a purpose - to move me along toward freedom. With each surrender, my belief that there was a purpose to my pain, that it was leading me toward insight, gave me the courage to keep on, to not cut and run, to hold steady and to keep my eyes focused on the possibility of change.
I can't make surrender happen on my schedule, but I can prepare the way so that I'll be ready for the moment of release. Where does that moment come from? Some would say it's grace or a moment of clarity or the hand of God. Wherever it comes from, it's a moment of expansion, a stabilizing connection to someplace beyond my own distorted ego.
Years ago, my days were pretty much filled with nothing but anxiety. A terrible tension, as if it were 3 o'clock in the morning and I had to figure out everything by dawn or else some unknown phantom would take me out and shoot me. It didn't matter how I tried to calm or distract myself - fear of some undefined future, dread of the abyss I was certain was up ahead kept me in a paralysis of indecision -- how could I choose anything when that choice might be a fatal error, a mistake which would consign me to a lifetime of loneliness and failure?
Then one day I was talking to some friends and someone said, "One day at a time." Such a cliche, I thought, but for some reason the words stuck. \ I heard, really heard them, and with a jolt, my constant inner tension gave way to a new realization. If I actually saw my life as one day at a time, it meant I didn't have to be haunted by the failures and mistakes of the past, and I didn't have to live in dread of whatever was to come. I could focus on the present, a place where one action leads to another and then another. No choice could be fatal or final; it would only lead to a new set of circumstances out of which I would make new choices. Each action was part of a continuum, the slow unfolding of my life. An image of the abyss had been constantly in front of me, I thought it could engulf me and so I feared a fatal error, the possibility of complete destruction. But the sense of a continuum which was now opening out felt like solid ground, a path made up of events and accidents and the unforeseen and the wonderfully unexpected, all of it grist for the mill of my ongoing evolution. There was spaciousness in the unfolding, ample room for steady deep breaths.
On that day, I began to find a new perspective from which to view and understand my experience. The overarching image of the abyss began to give way to the image of the continuum unfolding day by day. I began to understand that the circumstances of my life might not change, but my view of those circumstances could be transformed.
It is this I keep coming back to: out of the miraculous consciousness our brains give rise to, we always have the possibility of a new perspective, a new idea
which can set us free.
