"There are men who seem to have started in life with a bottle or two of champagne inscribed to their credit; whilst others seem to have been born close to the pain-threshold, which the slightest irritants fatally send them over."
-- William James
I know which one I am and I sometimes wonder why it should be so. I know that everyone struggles with their own particular issues, but some days I feel no one struggles as much as I do and no one has made as little progress as I have. I shake my head and fear there are certain knots in me that will never be untied, that even as I go to the grave I'll be dealing with the same resistances and cravings and negative voices as when I first started out. On champagne days, I think that's a good thing - it tells me there's no end to the depth inside and no end to the work that always leads me to energy and surrender. But mostly I use the fact that I struggle as proof there's something wrong with me. I beat myself up for not being perfect, for being human. In other words, some days I accept my struggles and even relish them, while other days, maybe most days, I struggle with the fact that I struggle.
Blaming myself for struggling is a way to keep me in the struggle, not making progress. Blame, shame, an anxious focus on self - they're bright shiny objects dangling in front of me, entrancing me, saying, "Dig in. Don't move. You know it's useless to hope so stay in this fog which requires nothing from you, never pushes you to take a risk and create the possibility of change." They keep me from even making an effort; they keep from willingness.
I can see the process of change has at least two aspects for me. First, I need to get free of my usual culprits so that I am willing to try, and then I have to gather the courage to act. For someone like me, mostly on the wrong side of the pain-threshold, getting free enough to act is no easy thing. And I realize that's the aspect I most blame myself for, having to find a way to surrender shame, blame and self-loathing, even at this late date. Why haven't I banished them, or at least made them into a low wall I can easily step over? Why is my stuff this stuff?
I've laid out an anatomy, a schematic of my struggle with struggling. These ideas are sometimes helpful but the fact is change never comes to me through rational thought or insight. It comes when something I can't grasp inside me shifts, when grace comes in and takes the veil off my eyes so that I feel new strength and clarity and see I'm in a different place. All the time I think I'll never escape blame, shame and self-loathing, wheels inside are turning; progress on my path is slowly being born. I become willing, ready to embrace my struggles and set free the energy to change.
Years ago I went to a birthday party for a friend. After we sang Happy Birthday and ate the cake (this was a westside of Los Angeles group and probably half the crowd had given up sweets), we went around the room, and took a turn saying what my friend meant to us. I remember how calm she was, taking it all in, and I thought to myself I couldn't bear to be the recipient of all that attention, that loving attention. I thought, I would rather die.
It's strange to remember a time when I couldn't receive compliments or hear anything good about myself. Very strange...I was desperate to shine in the world's eyes and yet I'd do everything I could to deflect the good things people said about me. It was a kind of extreme embarrassment but something more - there was an ocean between the compliment and what I thought of myself. I knew the muck inside, the doubts and fears, the pessimism, so I couldn't sit still for anything good said about me.
And something even more. One day I was brushing my hair, looking in the mirror, when a voice inside me said, "I want, but I can't have." I knew instantly this was a voice from the deepest part of me; I knew that at rock bottom I believed I would always be denied, could not have all the things I wanted, would always live with frustration and despair. It was the voice of my emotional anorexia, my perverse inability to take in all the kinds of nourishment every person needs. I lived on the razor's edge, ravenous and self-denying all at once.
Reader, I've changed. I can trace the path to change, the watersheds and landmarks that made me willing to see what was inside me, and gave me the courage to look. I can feel the many moments I was forced to surrender self-loathing and -denial bit by little bit. I can feel all the times I had very little to go on except the faith that if I didn't run from whatever truth I found inside, I would somehow be all right. I had been covering up so much fear and lacerating beliefs about myself and I'd been terrified that if there was one little chink in my armor the whole facade would collapse. But I learned the opposite was true: in Leonard Cohen's words, "there's a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in." That's how the light gets in.
The light has come in, slowly, so slowly that sometimes I've thought nothing at all was happening. But many wheels inside were turning, are still turning, and I've learned to walk the braided path of willingness, surrender, faith and courage. Each of the strands is crucial and takes its turn at the forefront of my being. The more time passes, the more I see that braided path is the only one I can walk now, and more and more it's the only one I want.
To find a way to come out from under self-loathing and fear is the greatest gift, one I receive over and over. I unwrap the gift with gratitude and humility and sit quietly so that more light, and even more light, can keep coming in.
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.
There are "frameworks" and "contexts" which are the opposite of what interests me. Many contexts grow out of rigid ideas - the orthodoxies of organized religion, political ideologies, conspiracy theories. These are closed systems and their main characteristic - and failing - is that they don't allow for new information and ideas. Everything that might be "new" is made to fit a locked world view, interpreted as further evidence of the rightness of the particular set of beliefs. These systems constrict rather than expand, limit rather than increase.
All beliefs - those that constrict and those that expand - are just that, beliefs. For a long time, I believed every negative thought the voices in my head shouted at me, believed that I wasn't good enough and was doomed to frustration and unhappiness. I thought there must be something fundamentally wrong with me, some flaw I couldn't see. And because it's hard to act against that tidal wave of fear and doubt, the facts of my life lived out those thoughts. I was frustrated and unhappy, felt alien and isolated; I censored myself over and over again because, since I was doomed to failure, what was the point of even trying to achieve and connect? These self-loathing, self-lacerating beliefs ruled me and turned me into an emotional anorexic; I was starving for connection and purpose but I couldn't feed myself. I was living in a closed system of negative beliefs and everything that happened was proof of the rightness of those beliefs. How could it be otherwise when I myself was the main witness for the prosecution?
Then something inside me began to shift, and the closed narrow ideology of my self-loathing and fear slowly, very slowly showed enough cracks so that the light of hope, at first a despairing kind of hope, could come in. A flicker of possibility, the merest shadow and I grabbed on to it. I didn't know it then, but I had come a great distance in order to begin, to climb out of the bushes and step on to the path.
Questions worth asking:
If belief, meaning and value are conferred by us through our interpreting consciousness, how do we know what's True with a capital T? Does Truth even exist?
How can we create a new context through which to judge our experience, transform a context that constricts into one that expands?
How do we move toward freedom?
