Dealing with our stuff

 I just love this conversation between Krista Tippett and angel Kyodo williams talking about meditation. The podcast and transcript can be found https://onbeing.org/programs/the-world-is-our-field-of-practice-apr2018/

ANGEL KYODO WILLIAMS is the founder of the Center for Transformative Change in Berkeley, California. She’s the author of Being Black: Zen and the Art of Living With Fearlessness and Grace and Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love, and Liberation.

 

I have looked at only one aspect of the conversation – the practice of sitting meditation.

williams is a Zen priest and offers incredible insights into the sitting practice. When we sit in meditation we experience and observe enormous number of emotions that we think are ours. This extract helps us make sense of emotions – we often take on others – and the language and imagery is explored in such a way that it landed on me and got me thinking.

In taking up bits from the conversation, I am captured by the idea of the emotions in a house and the layeredness of them. Here Tippett shows the idea in an instant – “we sit and feel”. What a wonderful way to see it.

MS. TIPPETT: One of the words you used, when you were writing in 2016 about what this moment requires of us, is that it calls for “pause.” And you come from a tradition, a spiritual tradition, which has sitting at its core — “So we sit, and we feel” — I want you to unfold that a little bit, because this thing we’re talking about, it’s so countercultural; it can so easily sound like this is about not being relevant and not attending to what is urgent. But sitting, as you — and what happens in sitting and in pausing is not about not acting. It’s a different move, so just take us inside that.

williams picks up the language of the “different move” but her response eloquently demonstrates how we interpret our feelings and, as she says, they ‘are not clean, or not free of all of the things that are impacting us outside’:

REV. WILLIAMS: Yeah, I love that — “It’s a different move.” There is so much momentum to every aspect of what drives us, what moves us, what has us hurtling through space, including all of our thoughts and even our own sense of our emotions; how we interpret any given feeling, any experience of discomfort; where that discomfort sits in our bodies. It’s not just that we have a feeling of pain or awkwardness. It’s that we then interpret that.

And those interpretations — much to our chagrin, we come to understand through a process of observing them — are not clean, or not free of all of the things that are impacting us outside. And so even our sense of what pains us and what makes us feel shame, feel guilt, feel awkwardness, feel put-upon by people, feel disempowered, has to do with the external information and cues that we have received. And they’re moving at an incredible rate of speed. And, for the most part, we almost never get the opportunity to observe them and sort through them — kind of like that drawer that collects everything in your house.

MS. TIPPETT: I have a few of those.

For me, the house imagery really says it all:

REV. WILLIAMS: Yeah, where you say, “Oh, but wait a minute, someone lived in this house before me,” in essence. “And some of that stuff is not mine. Actually, this is not mine. That’s my mom’s. This is not mine; that’s the inheritance of white supremacy,” or, “That’s the inheritance of generations of oppression and marginalization that subjects me to habitually feeling less-than, even if the current situation has no intent to make me feel that way.” And we have no real way of being able to discern what is mine, what is yours, what are we holding collectively, what have I inherited, what have I taken on as a measure of protection, of a way to cope at some point in my life or past lives, that I no longer need?

As williams says, there is no quick fix to get to the other side of how it can get to be and really is a daily process. williams again:

And sitting lets us begin to do that. It doesn’t do it right away, because what we first are confronted with is just the assault of the amount of thoughts and the mixed messages that just inhabit our body and our mind and our experience on an ongoing basis — that when we sit, the first thing we’re met with is not quiet or calm or peace. The first thing we’re met with is, “Oh, my God. Who is in here, and why won’t they shut up? How do I get them to stop?” And not only is something and someone and everyone speaking to me, it’s mixed messages. Things don’t agree with each other. I don’t agree with my own truth. I’m having arguments in here that are not my arguments, they are someone else’s arguments. They’re my parents’ arguments.

For the first time in my life, I have heard someone explore with such precision what happens to our thoughts and emotions. So often they are not our own and yet we make them our own – they are someone else’s arguments. Wow, what simplicity and so much power. williams continues by saying how important sitting is:

Sitting lets us just, first of all, recognize that we are this massive collection of thoughts and experiences and sensations that are moving at the speed of light and that we never get a chance to just be still and pause and look at them, just for what they are, and then slowly to sort out our own voice from the rest of the thoughts, emotions, the interpretations, the habits, the momentums that are just trying to overwhelm us at any given moment.

Ultimately, I am drawn to this because of the way in which williams singles out our own agency, our own choice, that we don’t have to be this or that or yanked around by other’s emotions. It gives a boundary that is quite extraordinary.

And when I say “trying to overwhelm us,” that’s really a key thing to understand, because that means that there’s an “us.” There’s a core and deep and abiding “us” that is being overwhelmed by something that’s actually not us. And when we become aware of it, we’re like: “Oh, I actually have some choice here.”

I believe it is grace that brings us to hear such incredible insights. I am so often aware how there is not a non-stop flight to our destination but rather short hauls to the next place where we are given opportunities to learn more deeply about ourselves and how we deal with stuff. Krista Tippett and angel Kyodo williams have been great travelling companions and I am grateful to them for how they help us to find our own voice with a language and clarity that I never thought possible.

No escape

I was at Cape Town International Airport when he said that I should be grateful to the person who triggered my series of crises and, boy, was I furious with him.

In saying that he had absolutely no clue about the actual pain of the experience – the almighty disruption that had flipped me out. That had hung me out to dry. I literally had had no inner resources to deal with the flooding of my feelings that had nowhere to go.

That is why the therapeutic experience is so very important to deal with those feelings. Good therapy enables the crisis to be experienced in a way that is held. A kind of holding environment, a container. It is the place where extremely difficult feelings can be known, named, explored, excavated and dived into.

This is not to make it sound easy. It is emotionally and spiritually exhausting. Importantly though, the one to one experience with my therapists, gave me the time and space to get some kind of calmness and stability knowing that, although mine was fairly prolonged, ultimately the therapeutic environment is temporary.

Inevitably, I believe (although this may not be true for everyone) we have to fall back on our own inner lives. What therapy did was to give me the language to name the feelings and the emotions and ultimately helped me to see the universal truth that suffering is something that each of us do in varying degrees. Jack Kornfield amusingly states in one of his podcasts, some of us are quite loyal to suffering and I can relate to that experience.

What is key though is what Mark Epstein says in The Trauma of Everyday Living about the examination of our own trauma: ‘While the things that bother us cannot always be eliminated, we can change the way we relate to them.’ I am not sure what I am imagined when I first went into therapy – whether I wished to find a way to escape from the pain – but I thought six or seven sessions would fix me. Not so. Over four years later I am not fixed but I am in an environment where I have at long last acknowledged my suffering in all its awfulness. I am in a much better position to be the sovereign of my own destiny and not yanked about by feelings and emotions. The key thing, too, is that I am not alone.

The disruption has led me down all sorts of roads and discoveries of contemporary psychotherapists and philosophers, thinkers and wise men and women who have an extraordinary understanding of the human condition.

I have learned a lot and it has been tough – on reflection there is no single truth except perhaps the line from Pema Chodron’s book, The Wisdom of No Escape. All the wisdom points in this direction. It is in the examining of the feelings, rather than running away from them and acknowledging trauma and suffering instead of pretending that everything is normal, that we can begin to walk into a wider view of how we live and deal with our stuff.

I wrote Raw-Red Bone of Memory in the midst of my own extraordinary pain which was both spiritual and mental and on re-reading, I have a new perspective. I had had a sharp memory of physical pain and in some kind of weird way this experience became, without sounding too pompous, allegorical.

He called out in a distress forged in the tangle-metal of an accident. Only the songbird-needle of morphine could ever so briefly-fleetingly extinguish the misery of the wide-open unhealed wound, gaping with flesh and blood.

I lay in the next bed to him in the hospital, having been admitted in the morning, doubled over with my own pale version of pain. An emergency had whipped out a fetid appendix (yes, I know, I am being dramatic) and my only experience then was of post-anaesthesia dullness and the odd stomach muscle smarting slightly in a sudden movement.

Summoned, the nurse was unable to ease his pain. He half-shouted out that he didn’t care about being addicted to that songbird in a vial. He simply needed the sweet relief, even if it only glanced him, took the edge off.

Until today, I had completely forgotten about those midnight hours lying in a hospital bed listening to a man who sobbed in his pain, and who cursed and swore at the world. I had been  remembering my own pain, gliding in on a songbird of hope, blowing away the awful what-have-beens that sometimes fester in the raw-red bone of memory when, startled, I thought of that hospital ward thirty four years ago.

https://shorttrouseredyouth.wordpress.com/2014/05/29/raw-red-bone-of-memory/

Which leads to the bit where, now looking back, I can be thankful to the bastard that triggered my shit. I have come full circle from that conversation in Cape Town and see this differently too.

Epstein posits that if trauma does not destroy us, ‘wakes us up both to our own relational capacities and to the suffering of others. Not only does it make us hurt , it makes us more human caring and wise’.

That’s my wish for myself and anyone who is in crisis and pain.

 

”Where ever you go, there will be people who will be difficult. You know they are waiting for you.” Jack Kornfield, Podcast: The Garden of the Heart

 

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The understanding of the firing line

There was no actual declaration of war. It kind of just happened. It all began in skirmishes with disintegration. A slow motion, frame by frame shattering. If only I had known of impermanence then I would not have clung for dear life on the shards-scattered-splintered. I mentioned that the guns were trained on myself but that is not entirely true. Gunned down but gunning at the world. The raw red bone was in my head and in my soul. The numbness was not numbness but a strange out of touchness and a fragmentation and no place to contain the battleground. The shell shocked feelings rode out on a storm-flood. There is a possibility of explanation: the groundlessness, cratered by the total war heard in my head.

Caught

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Obsessive thoughts caught
in a rat trap grip
and the cheese was not even worth it.
I worry what people think.
The darkened train carries the faces of their
judgement on the window mist.
I think I am burned out.
I have no container to keep the embers - the hot coal ash
floats in on the wind.
I snatch them back - too hot to touch.

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‘But in order to loosen their grip, we must first know what they are.’
Mark Epstein Advice Not Given: A Guide to getting Over Yourself

Building tree houses in our minds

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Just been listening to a podcast* with Dan Harris and Jeff Warren in conversation about their new book, Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics: A 10% Happier How-To Book and they started to talk about how we build tree houses in our minds, climb up and stay there – all we can see is the forest. Apparently it was an image from Saul Bellow. Anyway, the imagery got me thinking …

About how we can become so fixated on our stuff and begin to live in a tree house. As Jeff Warren says in the podcast, we start paving the tree house with mirrors and reflect back on ourselves our own thoughts, ideas and obsessions about whatever. This tree house becomes our world.

The way to get down out of the tree house is to meditate, the book argues. Then you can see the ‘figure inside the ground’ – the tree house against the backdrop of a mountain or other parts of our landscape. Ah, perspective which is liberating and helps us to get unstuck from our trance, our tree house of the mind.

Meditation helps us notice how we are feeling right now and we can pop out of the trance as Jeff Warren says.

I find this imagery very helpful and a great steer about how to get an altogether different angle on the figure inside the ground.

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You can find Jeff Warren at The Consciousness Explorers Club http://cecmeditate.com

and at  http://jeffwarren.org

* https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/10-happier-with-dan-harris/id1087147821

The Unexpected

I wrote this at a time that I was dealing with stuff and how we can have break-throughs. Dealing with pain can be startling and then something changes …

Bone-dry, sand-blasted soul-sahara. There is no escape to green springs, no oasis in the stinging dust-storm of things unexpected. And then the rains came: the footprint of the memory of pain was washed away until the next dry season. Now a time of colours flowered and the bone-dryness drip-dried into the forgotten.

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The alchemy of anger

I am looking at ways to turn anger into something that does not harm and debilitate. What I am writing is provisional. I am not quite yet there with my thinking.

It is true to say that grief not dealt with, despair that has no where to go and a fear that sits with us by brooding and corroding us – all three can end up as anger.

What happens to anger that has no place to go? It turns on itself, leading to depression. In the wrong hands it can become uncivil, possibly violent and massively painful.

Anger and fear are on the same side of the coin. Maybe they are on the opposite sides but they are part of the flight or flight.

Too much fear can shrivel us, make us lose our sense of self. Equally, not feeling any fear is problematic. Without fear we become manic, self-destructive or even hubristic. The key is being self-aware of the feeling of fear or the lack of it. The same thing with anger.

Anger that has no self-awareness becomes self-righteous or self-loathing. Anger that is not looked after and not dealt with can become depression. It can go underground and can seep in the places where it becomes toxic and kills the goodness of the person.

Pema Chodron and others argue that we are responsible for creating all of our emotion. Pema refers to the work done by Jill Bolte Taylor:

“An emotion like anger that is an automatic response lasts just ninety seconds from the moment it is triggered until it runs its course … When it lasts any longer, which it usually does, it is because we have chosen to rekindle it.”

Alex Miles, writing in Elephant Journal picks up the same theme and says, quite clearly, that we are responsible for making our own emotions: “Although we may not want to admit it we are responsible for creating all of our own emotions. Every thought that we think causes a chemical reaction and that reaction causes a physical response.” Alex Myles, Elephant Journal (It’s about the Mindful Life)

Is it true to say that no one makes you angry? That you make yourself angry? Anyway it is something to reflect on and become aware of next time you have that sensation. I think that someone or something makes us angry. It does have a context.

Here’s the thing – the radical thing to think about – the emotion of anger lasts only ninety seconds and then we make up the story around that emotion and it can remain with us for decades.

At that moment of anger, be aware of what has made us angry. Give the feeling, the moment, oxygen and space to open us up. Stop there. Don’t act out. Don’t repress. Don’t blame it on anyone else. Don’t blame it on ourselves. Make it open-ended. It will pass in ninety seconds. Listen to yourself. Listen to your own suffering.

Being self-aware of our suffering gives us the gift of the chance to be kind to ourselves.

This next line has shattered my view. I always thought with anger – get it out.

Thich Nhat Hanh says, “When you express your anger you think you are getting anger out of your system, but that’s not true.” When you fan your anger and don’t stop to work out why you are angry then that’s a difficult place to be.

Attend to anger. Be aware of it. Have self-awareness. Befriend it. Sit with it. Don’t try to suppress it. Surrender to it. This is the renunciation. It is not allowing anger to control. Know that it exists.Can I let the anger open me and not try to shoo it away?

Pema suggests that we practise how to deal with such emotions in Living Beautifully. 

Acknowledge the feeling, she says. Give it your full and compassionate and welcoming attention and drop the story line about the feeling. This allows you to have direct experience of it, free of interpretation. Don’t be judgemental of it. Just be present with the moment. She also urges us to think about where it is located in our body and asks the questions, ‘Does it remain the same for every long? Does it shift and change?’

If we let the story line go around the sensation, we will be freed of it and remember nothing lasts for ever. Becoming self-aware when it comes to the emotion of anger can lead to a great sense of well-being.

Even with the clouds that float above us, we can be open and present to the beauty that surrounds us.

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References – both enormously helpful in dealing with this stuff – 

Pema Chodron, Living Beautifully

Miriam Greenspan, Healing through the Dark Emotions

Elephant Journal

Fathoming the ‘Not Self’

I have begun to explore the idea of the ‘not self’ and, as I have discovered, and as has been reported by those who know better than me, it is a difficult concept to understand all at once. I strongly suspect any depth of knowing what it means will happen incrementally for me.

I may well forget everything that I have learned about the concept in the next week or so!

I have to declare at once that the way into an understanding of the ‘not self’ is through meditation and getting up close to stuff we do not like and feel uncomfortable with:

It’s that space where we allow our minds to observe the scary feelings we are experiencing such as anxiety, anger, sadness and grief – things that we want to run away from in an instant. Working on the ‘not self’ through meditation, I believe, ironically enables us to feel a detachment from it. (So I have been told.)

But we have to practice often.

There is immense practical value in not taking our thoughts, feelings and emotions personally.

The debate about whether the self exists is too complex at this moment for me to even begin to fathom. It is sufficient, at this stage, to get the idea of not identifying with the feelings around self and to gain a bit of clarity around the fact that the various parts of yourself that you are feeling are not part of you actually. Just writing this paragraph was difficult enough. 

Robert Wright, author of Why Buddhism is True? in a podcast with Dan Harris (10% Happier) says that we should start with problematic things about ourself.

Mediate on them so you don’t have to identify with them. Ultimately, you do not have to accept the discomfort that they have been causing you.

So if you sit with the feeling of being a ‘failure’ because you were told you were one by your father or mother or brother or whoever, you will find if you get close up to the feeling and scrutinise it you may well discover that this is not you, but someone else’s voice that you have come to believe is ‘you’.

Unpack it as you sit quietly and meditate upon it and, over the course of several sessions of working with this, you may well find that the feeling dissolves. At any rate it will lessen as you no longer identify with it.

Remember – you do not have to accept the discomfort that the feeling causes you.

I am obsessive and, as anyone with this condition knows, it is freighted with awful feelings.

Being obsessive can be positive however. It can mean that if I latch onto an idea such as the attempt to explain the ‘not self’, then it’s a good thing in many ways. I won’t rest until I get it as far as my intellect enables me to.

But, of course, being obsessive has its massive downsides. (Hello, understatement.) It is not fun really as you begin to believe the voice telling you to check things to see whether or not they are true. And you do this over and over … Well, they are only feelings that give rise to thoughts that are not to be believed. To buy into them causes untold suffering as I well know.

This work through reading and meditation (in a chair at the moment and not yet on a cushion) has been enormously helpful to me and has started to give me greater clarity. As Wright suggests – the lack of clarity about our thoughts, feelings and emotions can often cause deep suffering. Ah, yes, it is the lack of clarity. Metation clears the mind.

In the same podcast in which Harris and Wright are conversing, Harris says that there is immense practical value in not taking our thoughts, feelings and emotions personally. He argues that if you follow this guidance, “Then they will not yank you around as much.”

Being obsessed is being yanked around by illusions and delusions. Feeling a failure does the same thing and so is the idea of not being good enough and feelings of anxiety. Yank, yank, yank.

Of course, some feelings are correct but, often as not, they lead you up the garden path.

Meditation allows you to accept their guidance or let go of them, says Robert Wright.

And, slowly, we gain clarity about ourselves and our ‘not selves’ and begin to reduce our suffering.