I was stopped at a traffic light at an intersection I've passed through a thousand times over the years. I look ed across the street and realized that the shop on the opposite corner had changed hands once more. I remember when it was a flower shop owned by a man who sang opera, followed by a vintage clothing store, followed by two or three businesses that didn't last long. Now I saw it had been updated in a very snazzy style and although I couldn't tell just what was inside, I knew it had to be something very trendy.
The light changed and I drove on thinking about the visual overlay of the streets of my city I carry with me, a stack of acetate sheets my memory lifts to reveal what came before. There is much more to the overlay than I have seen; change went on before my time and will continue after. But there is something very moving for me in stepping back to see the various iterations, the slowly evolving change. It connects me to the deep flowing river of experience that washes over us all.
This set me thinking about my own slow evolution, the way I got from there to here. I can see the whole arc, the many eras - when I was in school or was married or lived in New York or... Like everyone else, I carry a sense of continuity, a continuous consciousness (which William James called "the stream of consciousness") so that my sense of myself remains constant. I always know that I am me. But I can't snatch a single isolated moment of this "me" - it's gone even as I reach for it.
Still, I know I have a story. It's the narrative of all the steps taken and not taken, of choices that were productive and others which weren't, of things remembered and forgotten, of love given and withheld and received - all of it teaching me lessons when I'm ready for them, the lessons of change.
I am the process of evolution and I'm also an organic whole, without tears or disjunctions. Past, present, future; the whole of me arises from moment to moment, created by flux, anchored in change.
I'm compulsively on time. In fact, if I'm not ten minutes early, I feel that I'm late. Time is my tyrant with all the earmarks of compulsion - the sense of something driving me, an anxious motor, its low vibrations quickening my pulse rate. I don't know why I'm like this but I can say, given all the time I spend waiting for other people, if I have to have a compulsion about time I'd much rather it was for being late. The idea of other people waiting for me is an unexpectedly pleasant possibility.
Actually, there's another kind of waiting I think about more. It's the waiting that comes out of magical thinking. Something will happen and I'll be changed - I'll put out a piece of work and its reception will change my life. I'll get this or that or meet someone. and everything will be different. I may as well say I'll win the lottery.
It's the kind of waiting that flies under my radar, so much a part of me I don't even notice it. I don't notice what it tells me: it's all right to be passive, I don't have to push past my resistance to discipline, I don't have to get up and do anything at all. Waiting's voice isn't as loud as it used to be - I've pushed past many of the things that blocked me - but on days when I don't feel like doing anything, and then don't, those days when I let things slide, I know the voice hasn't died away. I'm sure it will follow me into my grave.
It isn't easy noticing core issues, the ones that travel through as silently and invisibly as the blood travelling through my veins. But sometimes, I take a step back, not planning it, and I have a moment of clarity. I see what has been circulating inside;it comes up to consciousness and I can put it into words. That's the beginning of all great change, bringing into consciousness just what has been holding me back. Once I see it, I can move it around, look at it from different angles, and make out its anatomy. I can study how it works in me. I can shake hands with it, no longer in denial, or fear of what will arise, or the obliviousness that comes so easily. And I can surrender to time, acknowledge there are certain issues I will deal with again and again. But I know I will make progress and that's what matters - the sense that I'm heading in the right direction. A momentum starts to build, an appetite for working at change. There is so much hope in that energy, and it's hope that leads me on.
I went shopping very early this morning at a local flea market. I was looking for vintage photos and paper items, and other things that catch my eye. I've been doing it for a long time and by now I know a great many people - serious collectors, shoppers and sellers. Some people I know well enough to stop and chat about our latest finds; with others it's enough to smile or wave in passing. This morning I felt what I always feel - completely at home in that world, connected to so many people, part of a real community.
That's not the only world I move through. There are at least half a dozen others. I've felt uncomfortable in some of them - tongue-tied, intimidated, and defensively arrogant. But that doesn't happen so much anymore. Most of time I'm fully myself no matter where I am. I used to judge and fear that I was being judged. I stood in a circle of friendly people and felt completely alone. There was a veil between me and the rest of the world, an opaque scrim that kept me focused on my lack of connection.
But somewhere along the line things changed. I gave up expectations - of being liked or disliked, admired or not, noticed or not, of anything in particular. Slowly, my facade dissolved. I became myself with no shadows, no hanging back, no assessing myself and the world. I became comfortable in my own skin.
I didn't do this myself, at least not consciously. I could never have seen so clearly what I needed to surrender and then simply gone ahead and done it. Instead, life has gone along, brought me its problems, disappointments, mistakes and in trying to process those a general equanimity has come almost as a byproduct of dealing with one thing at a time. I used to want the big picture to change in a flash of magic but that desire for magic only got in my way. But taking my life problem by problem, sometimes focused so narrowly it was obsession, I began to see the lessons in each problem and how I processed it. I began to feel the continuity of the struggle to get free, the ideas at the heart of whatever individual thing I was dealing with. Eventually, those ideas pushed to the surface, began to arch over all of my "issues" and problems, and slowly became the context of everything in my life.
That's the reason I've become comfortable in my skin, no longer afraid (most of the time) to meet the world on the world's terms. My willingness to do what I can to get free, my quest to find a refuge inside me that I can always count on, my nurturing humility and gratitude, slowly changed me on a level I didn't even know existed in me. I didn't do all that easily, without resistance, but I did it as much as I could on most any given day. All the time I was kicking and screaming, locked into my own ideas of what I needed, something else was taking over, floating me up and putting me down in a place I want to be.
I was meditating this morning, focused on my breathing, when I heard a voice say, "Step out of your fear." I've heard it many times before and always see a circle of low stones, the size of cinder blocks, though made of stone. I see myself step over them and sometimes, when I've repeated, step out of your fear many times, and imagined myself stepping over the stones, fear leaves me and I calm down.
This morning, the stones changed into a doorway with all its symbolic meaning. I imagined myself walking through. But the image wasn't resonating in me. Then I saw a gate, a tall one attached to a fence or walls, a gate that clearly marked one side and the other, under a broad blue sky. I wanted to pass through and know myself in a different place.
I focused on that image for the rest of my meditation. I was looking for something I've felt before, the moment when suddenly there's no barrier between image and me. I've taken it fully into me, or it's taken me. In a sense, the kind of connection I mean is an obliteration, a sudden disappearance of the walls between me and the world, between me and self, and self and object. In short, a mystical experience. It didn't happen today but it's happened before and I'm sure it will again. I know I'll stumble into those moments of exquisite obliteration.
I come back from those moments with the seeds of change. I don't think about it. I don't make up stories around it; I don't think that moment means X, Y, or Z. I move through my days, busy with other things, but underneath, deep below the crust of self-consciousness, those seeds are growing. I don't realize it until one day I find myself doing things differently - writing more, cleaning things up immediately, making commitments and keeping them, not getting angry at the slow driver in front of me. I have more often a feeling of equanimity.
I don't know how it works. In that giving over of self, there is the sense of very deep expansion. Do the molecules in my body expand, reorder themselves, initiate new wiring? I'm not seriously considering that theory, but who knows? Stranger things have turned out to be true. Whatever the mystical moment is, it's the place where change begins, the place where healing at a depth I can't fathom takes root.
There are things I know with my mind and things I know with my body. I want both kinds of learning but for me it's in my body that deep connection comes into being. And sometimes, I who compulsively puts everything into words, want to be silent as I sit with that.
"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."
One night, lying in bed waiting for sleep, it suddenly came to me that whatever else had happened or would happen, I had made the crucial turning, done the work I was meant to do. I had climbed out of the bushes and gotten on the path.
Before that crucial turning, I felt fragmented, full of contradictions, self-loathing and despair that I would ever be able to change. I thought there was something fundamentally wrong with me but I couldn't see what it was; at the heart of me there was a mystery I'd never solve because I didn't even know what was mysterious.
But I made the crucial turning. I had a spiritual awakening. I discovered something beyond and behind the problems and fears that filled my thinking, about myself and about the world. I'd come to understand certain universal spiritual principles - surrender, detachment, atonement, meditation, ongoing self-examination, service - and slowly those principles became the context of my life. When something bad happened, I asked myself, which one of those principles will help me get free? Do I need to surrender or let go or accept what is; do I need to ask, what is my part? Do I need to take a moment to sit quietly and find the energy of those principles inside me? How can I apply those principles so I can climb the ladder they provide to a higher perspective?
I have many regrets about the past and on most days I wish certain things were different now. I wish the blues and lethargy didn't come around to claim me. I wish my life had more continuity. I wish so many things. But there is a continuity, an unspooling ribbon beneath my feet and it supports every step I take. It's the path, the solid ground of faith in the principles that I've lived with for a very long time. Faith has grown in me because I've experienced time after time the solace and freedom they always give me when I remember to breathe deeply and make the effort to connect with them.
I'm a great procrastinator. Sometimes, I put off things I actually feel I want to do. I want to have a clean house, but I procrastinate about actually cleaning. I want to take those bags of clothes to the Goodwill, but I put off taking them. In fact, I can let them sit under the dining table for weeks. There are many others tasks I can postpone doing and for as long as it takes me to get fed up with what hasn't been done.
When I was in graduate school, I put off writing papers until the last minute. That "until the last minute" is very much a part of procrastinating. But maybe I was ruminating all the time I wasn't writing so by the time I sat down I had a good idea of what I wanted to say. That's putting a kind spin on it, but that might be the right thing to do - procrastination is a prejorative and I have more than enough issues I blame myself for, blame which generally makes it harder for me to do anything about what I'm blaming myself for in the first place.
There's another more subtle procrastination and it has to do with internal change. I want to overcome my habit of zoning out, of wanting only to lie on the bed, watch a video or just stare at the ceiling. I've come to call it a habit because in giving it a name, I bring it down to size and have a realistic chance of change. The only way to do that is to act in spite of my desire to zone out - but I push away, put off facing whatever it is at the heart of my resistance. Holding myself back is an action - not the one I think I want but a willed action nonetheless.
I've spent a very long time trying to get to the reasons I put off even important things and hold myself back from change. Why do I have this resistance? But there's another habit, my repeatedly telling myself I have this resistance and blaming myself for not pushing past it. That's a story I tell myself - I am the one who can't get past my resistance - and it's a habit of mind so ingrained, so huge inside me, I don't register how often I tell myself that story. I think it's reality, my only reality, and I despair of ever changing it.
I spend a lot of time analyzing myself, taking my temperature, trying to put into words what I think is going on inside me. I believe in self-reflection. But trying to understand the reasons for my procrastination hasn't helped me change all that much. But I've come to think of my self-analysis as a distraction. Looking at my procrastination from every angle keeps me entertained while I'm procrastinating. By this time, though, I know there's no magic, no fairy dust that will descend and make it easy for me to hop, skip and jump to act. If I want to get those bags of clothes to the Goodwill, I have to shake hands with my resistance, my habit of procrastination and see that I'm bigger, my being is larger than those two old friends. Then there's hope that I will take my eyes off the ceiling, stand up, drag the bags to the car, put the key in the ignition, shift into drive, and go. There's no help for it. Shift into drive, and go!
Years ago, I was on the cross town bus in New York. I can't remember where I was going - for that matter, I can't remember where I was coming from. The one thing I do remember is at some point looking up, and there standing across the aisle was the most beautiful boy I've ever seen. He had the kind of beauty that compels you to stare and I couldn't look away. He was tall, with rosy cheeks, light eyes, dark hair - I guessed he was fifteen or sixteen. I suddenly thought, he's at the peak of perfection, and he may never be this beautiful again.
Why do I remember him all this time later? I think it was shock that imprinted him on me, the shock of coming upon beauty suddenly, all unaware. The usual things float past on any given day but only a few of them actually register and fewer of them stay with me for very long. But looking up and seeing the boy split the day open. I wanted to drink him in, take him, the sight of him, inside me. I understand now that I did take him inside; his beauty has stayed with me.
A few years ago, I saw a show of photographs by Josef Koudelka. In black and white, there was a series he took of gypsies - musicians, little boys pretending to be musclemen, the small village in which they lived. Other series were landscapes with ancient ruins and portraits and some that were almost abstractions of light and shadow. Many were candid shots of people encountered on the street doing all the ordinary things people do, transformed by Koudelka's eye into time-stopped importance. It's not quite right to call them candids; they're very carefully framed, many with the converging lines of a deep perspective. All of them have a feeling of stillness and space. I thought they were art and they were beautiful, not only the images but the meticulous way they were A. There was a lusciousness to the blacks and that's what drew me. The depth of the blacks, their richness, gave me the sense that no matter how long I looked, I'd never come to their bottom. I couldn't look away.
Over the centuries, philosophers and others have filled the world with words about Beauty. A vast number of people have put out their own versions of Beauty's definitions and standards and aesthetics. I've read some of those words - writing and reading about Beauty is an interesting way to pass the time. You can talk about the Platonic ideal and what Kant and a good many others said about Beauty with a capital B, but those concepts are very far removed from the actual experience of beauty, the interplay between subject and object, of merging with the object, that creates the intense feeling I recognize as beauty. This is what the boy on the bus and the Koudelkas have in common. They gave me the same experience - they pierced me to the bone, stopped me in my tracks, made me unable to look away.
Of course I remember them. Beauty, that intense experience of beauty, turns out to be indelible.
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.
The other day, I was reading about a man who had gotten lost on a hike in the mountains. I was most interested in how long it took him to realize that he was in fact lost. Evidently, we are always making mental maps of where we are - the familiar like your house or the way to your office. When we're in unfamiliar places, we need some time to orient ourselves. We try to construct maps of where we think we are and where we think we're going. The man in the mountains had a image of a lake that should have been up ahead. Even when he could see that the terrain wasn't matching what he knew it should be, he kept thinking the lake was just over the next ridge. He couldn't register where he was and continued to believe he was on his way to where he wanted to go. He rushed ahead trying to get over the next ridge and used up energy, made bad decisions about what he was capable of, ignored the growing danger of being alone in the woods.
He was lost in the mountains for five days and it was only on the fourth that he came fully to realize and to accept that he was lost. He stopped trying to make his surroundings conform to some idea in his head. He began to map out where he was and focus on what he needed to do to survive. Rescue came on the fifth day.
I hardly need pick out the metaphors. Rushing to make reality conform to my own mental maps. Continuing to deny the reality of where I actually am. Using up precious energy in denial. Wanting so much for something to true that I can't see what's in front of me.
In a sense, this is the human condition. Each of us wants what we want and sometimes desperately so. We all are sometimes blinded by our ego wants and needs and can't see beyond them. We can run for a long time before we notice we're not getting any place at all, that in fact we're lost, without a clue about what to do next. Anxiety and dread build because some part of me senses that something is wrong, I'm afraid to be "lost". But it turns out getting lost isn't the worst thing; the worst thing is continuing to insist that I know where I am.
Eventually, the bubble of denial has to burst and then comes the moment of surrender. It's the moment when I accept that I've been holding on to illusions and wasting my energy, my creativity, by insisting on my own distorted version of reality. I open my hand and anxiety and dread dissolve and I feel energy because they are no longer sapping me. I surrender and don't fall into the abyss. Instead, I float free, able to see what is. In that moment of clarity, a path opens up, one that will take me where I want to go. I find a place of refuge inside which is always my home. I can't get lost. I carry my home with me.
I've been thinking about survival again, both physical and psychological. It's impossible to predict who will survive a blizzard on Everest, or being castaway at sea or lost in a forest - any one of so many possibilities for being stranded and possibly hurt. But there are certain traits that all survivors share: an ability to come right into the moment and see the reality of what's happened and what in front of them needs to be done first. Staying calm, even when there's fear and anger. An assumption of responsibility, not looking for someone else to save them or someone to blame. Breaking things down to small, doable tasks. Believing they will succeed at the same time they're ready to accept whatever will happen. Being grateful they're alive. Aware of nature and its beauty.
While these are things that will help you survive accidents and natural disasters, they are also the stuff of psychological survival and spiritual growth. Come into the present. Find a place of refuge inside so you can let go of fear and anger. Take responsibility. Do what you can do on any given day. Open yourself to the beauty of this world. Have faith. Practice acceptance.
It's not surprising that all kinds of survivors have so much in common. No matter what we're facing, it's our hearts and spirits that determine the outcome. The good news is that all of them can be cultivated. We can keep them in mind as we go through the day, and as we go though whatever life brings.
This afternoon, a friend reminded me of the great spiritual principle, "Have no preference." Walk through the world and your life without desiring this or that, labeling good or bad, running away or running toward. Surrender all evaluating and judging. Be only a neutral filter of experience.
I understand no preference as something different from acceptance. Acceptance is what I come to after the fact; it's the step beyond experience when I process what has happened. Inevitably I label it as bad or hard and difficult and I work to find a way to be all right with it, with whatever happens no matter what.
But no preference is something I walk with in the moment. It's a constant state of presence. It isn't active or reactive; it's simply the membrane in my consciousness that lets the wind of experience flow through. Residing in no preference means it doesn't even occur to me to put labels on whatever happens in the world or inside me. All simply is.
I'm reminded of Emerson's transparent eyeball, something that doesn't reflect but absorbs. "...my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space - all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing: I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God."
I like "absorb" instead of receive. To absorb is an action while to receive suggests passivity. I want to take everything in, to merge my consciousness with everything that is, to touch the universe free of my oh so very opinionated ego. In a sense, to have no preference is to have a mystical connection to experience, to exist in that vibrating state of intense clarity, to feel no separation between self and other.
Alas, I am rarely in that place of no preference. The dailiness of life is filled with choices and opinions. I couldn't get through if I didn't value or discount or judge experience as I go. But I often have a deep seated preference that gets me into trouble. I decide which way I want, even need things to go and if they don't I feel disappointed or rejected or inconsequential, some bad feeling that can be the start of a descent down a rabbit hole. I've come far enough to know that the way out of those bad feelings is to find acceptance of what is, and when I fully connect with it, bad feeling goes.
If I could live with no preference, so much of my pain in life would never exist in the first place. But I think the most I'll manage is a few moments of truly being a neutral filter. But I don't forget hose moments and they give me a goal, an ideal to aspire to. I know that it's the journey not the arrival that matters. It's the journey that makes me alive.
Sometimes, I feel I can talk about anything. Pick a word or a phrase and I'm off and running, discovering as I talk the way one thing leads to another and, if I keep the chain going long enough, coming to something interesting.
There are other times when I feel I have nothing to say at all. My mind is blank and I lack the energy to focus it in on anything. I'm in the fog. I sense that words, images, ideas are flowing through but I barely catch any of it. That's the purpose of the fog; it keeps me in that strange state between focused thought and a constant flow of undifferentiated consciousness.
I think of being in the fog as time-wasting even though I know how productive it can be. My subconscious is churning and occasionally I catch a word or image that releases the energy I need to think about it. I begin talking to myself and one thing leads to another. When that happens, I can feel my insides sitting up, becoming alert. I come out of the fog into clarity. They are each other's flip side.
But I can't rely on the occasional nugget in the fog. If I want to get anything done, I have to purposely focus. That focusing is coming into the moment; it's simply being present, aware of being present. So much of that state is about doing, as if sharpening my thoughts, reaching for clarity brings out the desire in me to act, to think or do something concrete, substantial, an act of mind or body that leads me forward toward something productive.
I let myself slip too easily into the fog. It's an old habit that I'll only break if I practice coming into the present and focusing, through meditation, but also just by looking at the things in front of me, my laptop, my fingers pressing on the keys. That reminds me of QWERTY and the fact that I actually took a typing course in high school and how my parents said I didn't have to go to college - I could go to secretarial school instead, and that was typical of them - not understanding who I was and what I wanted. And how much of a hindrance that was and still is. And...And...And.
One thing always leads to another.
One of the great insights that has served me well is, there is no truth, only perspective, and perspective is subject to change. It's always possible that what I believe today may change tomorrow. There may be new information, or an insight into what something in my past actually meant, or the realization of how distorted my perception has been. I can always learn something new, about myself and about the world, and come to see things in a whole new light. I can revise my thinking. My consciousness can expand.
When I find myself vehemently declaring I'm right, I try to remind myself that I may come to doubt the rightness of what I say. When I'm feeling blue, I remind myself that I can find another perspective on whatever is bringing me down. When someone is spouting what I judge to be drivel, I remind myself that no one, least of all me, has a lock on the truth, and this drivel-spouting someone may turn out to be someone I admire and may have something to teach me.
There is an aspect of this insight that all beliefs can change which is very disturbing to some people. If there is no Truth with a capital T, what is there to hold on to? We want an anchor, to receive the message that than create it. We want something outside ourselves that is carved in stone so we can feel safe, protected, armed with the Truth. This is why some people fight so hard against the idea of evolution. The model of existence as a slow but constant flow, as an evolution that is random and not heading toward any particular end, means that there is nothing unchanging to hold on to. Nothing is eternal. There is no solid permanent ground. If that's true, what is there to have faith in and how do we justify faith at all?
I'm going to leave those particular questions for another day. In any case, there are enough philosophers, psychologists, theologians and ethicists preoccupied with getting to the bottom of them, as if such a bottom exists. I'll just talk about my own experience. Coming to understand that all of life is an evolution, that my own life is constantly evolving has liberated me. It has given me humility because I see that I might not have enough information and it's possible I'll turn out to be wrong. It's produced empathy for another person because once I say I may not know it all, it makes me able actually to see and hear the person standing in front of me, without judgment or the need to prevail. It leads me to compassion.
Basho wrote that every day is a journey and the journey itself is home. That is the insight at the heart of so many spiritual practices. My life is movement. Experience passes through me. The meaning of my life is in how I open myself to experience and stay open to learn from it.
I sometimes think about all the things I've gotten wrong. I used to be so quick to judge - those ideas are bad, that person is a hopeless jerk, there's no way that group will ever get anything done. So many views and opinions, about the world and about myself.
Most of those judgments come out of what I think of as fearful arrogance. If I approach that person, I might be rejected; therefore, it's better to tell myself that person is a waste of time. Those people are getting approving attention from the world; it's better to judge them, so I don't have to put myself on the playing field and show them I want to play. Maybe I'm making the wrong friends; what will the in crowd think of me? What if I do all the things I fear will shout loud and clear that I'm a loser? Much better to shield myself with arrogant opinions.
I told myself that I was strong, even invincible. That was the mask I wore to keep my fears buried in a place so hidden that I didn't have to admit to them. I was afraid that if I acknowledged fear, allowed one little chink in the armor, all the barricades against the things that terrified me would crumble. Better to judge the world first, before it judges me, especially because I'm afraid that judgment will go very much against me.
Judgments that come out of fear make me keep the world at bay, which is another way of saying that all that judging keeps me in isolation. The world can't threaten me, but only because I'm too defended to let the world in. And if I don't let the world in, if I don't allow myself to feel whatever is true inside - fears, desires, and other emotions - I'll never get down to who I am, to the things inside me that keep me from feeling free.
"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.
