Living from the Inside Out (aka Healing Self-Doubt)

Lately I have been paying attention to how much I quote other authors on this blog. I could attribute this behavior to my academic training, during which we learned both to avoid plagiarism and to honor our forebears and contemporaries by citing their work. I do like to give credit where credit is due, but I would be leaving out a large chunk of the story if I ended it there. A fuller picture of my quotation devotion involves self-doubt. My own healing has sprung from acknowledging and investigating, with tenderness and patience, a tendency (a compulsion, really) to live from the outside in. From early childhood to the present, I have taken in countless messages, from multiple individuals and contexts, that the external world decides the value of my being. These external missives have infiltrated a lot of inner space and, after enough time, have started to feel like my own voice. The unsolicited advice and commentary include statements like,

"You can do better. I'm disappointed with your performance."

"Don't look, dress, or talk that way. What will other people think?"

"Your way of thinking doesn't make any sense. There's no room for it here."

"Don't get too big for your britches!" (Old school, I know, but I love the saying.)

"If you would just follow our rules, your life would be easier."

I am going to venture a guess--without quoting a published author, mind you--that I am not alone in having doubted my ability to look inward for validation, insight, and clarity. The problem with living from the outside in is that we leave our sense of well-being to whichever way the wind is blowing, thereby creating opportunities for that wind to knock us right off our feet. We give up our power to nourish ourselves and determine our own sense of accomplishment and happiness.

Searching my outer landscape for answers has become such an automatic, unconscious habit that unlearning it has required disciplined practice and, more importantly, kindness. Although I now have internal and external resources to interrupt the taking in of messages that are not helpful to me, I did not start out that way. So when I think of the four year old who learned that defeating her peers in musical chairs won her a delicious individual-sized cake, I do not want to beat her upside the head for taking away from that experience the following lessons: the quality of her performance before an outside audience determined her worth, and there was simply not enough cake for everyone to have some. I do want to tell her that who she is matters more than what she does and that definitions of success can include more than winning prizes and approval from the people in charge. I also want to relay to her that despite the scarcity model all around her, she is sufficient as she is and can encourage others to believe in their own sufficiency, too.

Things get a little more dicey when I look back on an older self, but compassion remains more helpful to realizing an aspiration of living from the inside out than criticism, disappointment, or blame. In the realm of my quoteaholism, for example, I can choose to listen inwardly and find that below the shame I feel about my ongoing urge to prove I know enough to publish written words lies piles of self-doubt. Intimately studying their contours, I come to understand that I did not emerge from the womb this way. I learned to master self-doubt as I focused my attention on the workings of the external world and tried to belong to it, with little access to outside voices reinforcing a message about the intrinsic value we all share. Taking in this bigger picture, I can recommit to the aspiration to remember others' and my own inherent preciousness. I can then practice going inward for answers, having decided not to reject my own experience, and seek counsel from others who share the intention to honor everyone's dignity, including our own. Slowly by slowly, I can become less reliant on external "experts" as I carve a life's path, trusting my body's insights, the ability to pause, and learned skillfulness as guides. Replacing old beliefs with new ones, I can determine that the words sought from within are worthy of sharing with the outside world. We are interconnected after all, so the authenticity of the words turns out to matter more than the source.

Saying Yes and Saying No

According to relationship guru John Gottman, saying "Yes" is key to a happy partnership. In his words,

...you could capture all of my research findings with the metaphor of a saltshaker. Instead of filling it with salt, fill it with all the ways you can say yes, and that’s what a good relationship is. “Yes,” you say, “that is a good idea.” “Yes, that’s a great point, I never thought of that.” “Yes, let’s do that if you think it’s important.” You sprinkle yeses throughout your interactions...This is particularly important for men, whose ability to accept influence from women is really one of the most critical issues in a relationship...in a partnership that’s troubled, the saltshaker is filled with all the ways you can say no. In violent relationships, for example, we see men responding to their wives’ requests by saying, “No way,” “It’s just not going to happen,” “You’re not going to control me,” or simply “Shut up.” When a man is not willing to share power with his wife, our research shows, there is an 81% chance that the marriage will self-destruct.

Gottman has studied 1000s of couples in his "love lab," and I respect his perspective, despite not finding it very attentive to or inclusive of gender variant and queer configurations. When working with people in relationship, I find that questions frequently arise about how much individuals want to bend to sustain a relationship. Gottman's saltshaker metaphor highlights how repeated refusals to accept influence from our partners impedes our connection with them.

That said, I also appreciated seeing the following statement he makes in the article quoted above:

Agreement is not the same as compliance, so if people think they’re giving in all the time, then their relationships are never going to work. There are conflicts that you absolutely must have because to give in is to give up some of your personality.

What troubles me about the saltshaker metaphor is its limited focus on power dynamics and the extent to which gender socialization can contribute to expectations of compliance. Giving in may involve the harmful de-selfing that Gottman acknowledges. But giving in also may strengthen a sense of identity if we have been taught that accommodating others' needs is "good," "polite," and "kind." More pointedly, most of the women with whom I work carry the belief that attending to our own needs is "selfish," "rude," or "unacceptable." Not having practiced the art of listening within, many of us (men included) have a hard time identifying what our unmet needs are, let alone knowing how to make skillful requests of our partners to help us meet them.

In the paragraph opening this entry, Gottman hones in on men saying "No" to the detriment of relationships, but he does not address how important saying "No" remains for many women and additional people who struggle to be seen, heard, and valued as whole, self-determining human beings. In U.S. society, for example, where nearly one in five women have experienced rape or attempted rape in their lifetimes, "No" is frequently uttered but not heard.

Gottman does highlight that "respect and affection" are the two most important aspects of a relationship. I would like to take this issue of respect a step further by bringing psychologist Donna Hicks' dignity framework to the saltshaker conversation.* Hicks reminds us that dignity comes from a sense of inherent value and worth and that we all come into the world with it. "Each of us is worth having our dignity honored," she declares.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPF7QspiLqM

Hicks also emphasizes how vulnerable our dignity needs are since we frequently lose sight of others' and our own preciousness over time. When I think about the highly troubled relationships I have witnessed and of which I have been a part, dignity violations usually abound. If we repeatedly feel mistreated, neglected, and devalued, we create defenses that often take the form of hardness, anger, and resentment.

I am confident that the most powerful "Yeses" we can sprinkle on our relationships are those rooted in an honoring of our partners' inherent value and worth. Moreover, and as Hicks asserts, "when we honor others' dignity, we strengthen our own." However, if dignity violations occur, the ability to say "No, this _____ is not okay" is critical to maintaining a sense of our own value and worth. Under such circumstances, "No" means respecting our right to dignity.

* My wonderful colleague Ellyn Zografi introduced me to Hicks' work.

Going on a Pilgrimage

Most of us arrive at a sense of self and vocation only after a long journey through alien lands. But this journey bears no resemblance to the trouble-free "travel packages" sold by the tourism industry. It is more akin to the ancient tradition of pilgrimage--"a transformative journey to a sacred center" full of hardships, darkness, and peril.  

In the tradition of pilgrimage, those hardships are seen not as accidental but as integral to the journey itself. Treacherous terrain, bad weather, taking a fall, getting lost--challenges of that sort, largely beyond our control, can strip the ego of the illusion that it is in charge and make space for true self to emerge. If that happens, the pilgrim has a better chance to find the sacred center he or she seeks. Disabused of our illusions by much travel and travail, we awaken one day to find that the sacred center is here and now--in every moment of the journey, everywhere in the world around us, and deep within our own hearts.

But before we come to that center, full of light, we must travel in the dark. Darkness is not the whole of the story--every pilgrimage has passages of loveliness and joy--but it is the part of the story most often left untold.

That Parker Palmer sure does have some wonderful wisdom up his sleeve. I appreciate that he does not treat arriving at a sense of self as an easy matter, achieved by following a simple script. As the above quote makes clear, "hardships, darkness, and peril" are an essential part of awakening to our "sacred center."

I often hear people associate talk therapy with ineffective turns toward hardships: "Those bad things that happened are behind me, and that's where they should stay." I also frequently hear fear mingled in with a disdain for traveling through the shadows: "If I venture into the darkness, I'll be swallowed by it, never to emerge again." I hear wisdom in these statements, too. Our minds can be powerful juggernauts, taking us into winding labyrinths that contain terrifying monsters and excruciating shame. We need to make sure we have ample resources to go on pilgrimages and, when we feel depleted, be gentle with ourselves for deciding to staying in places where safety abides.

In the realm of healing, what strikes me as important about perceptions of safety is that we understand them to be real and (AND !) not necessarily true. In other words, we can honor our experience of feeling safe while also recognizing that illusions likely cling to that sense of safety. Our perceptions are not the whole story. We are more than our feelings, thoughts, bodily sensations, and the seemingly inviolable stories we create about all these phenomena, which, as it turns out, are fleeting. Not impermanent.

The illusions we carry about safety and other aspects of our lives usually emerge from earlier attempts at self-protection so we can embark on our pilgrimages with a light touch and plenty of kindness. Fists clench to regain safety when we feel danger. Therefore judgment does not need to accompany our search for the light.

Parker and other wise teachers remind me that I have to go inward to find the sacred center. Others can provide guidance and solace, but they cannot awaken me. They cannot rescue me from the darkness if I am to understand--and understand deeply--that the sacred center is always with and within me. Additionally, we cannot will clarity into being. We often have to get lost and take those falls that Parker mentioned before we open our palms to the sky and surrender to the reality that much of this life is beyond our control.

The beauty of surrender, of letting go, is that we can more readily come back to the present moment and actually inhabit it. Additionally, an open palm provides more space than a clenched fist for insights to emerge. For example, we may come to understand through our pilgrimages that our stories of deficiency actually involve the playing of roles, projected by others and learned over time. With that knowledge, we can unlearn old roles and, in the space generated from that unlearning, focus our attention on living in ways that are not so limited or limiting. We may also come to know that vulnerability--moments of fear, loneliness, and sadness--generated our willingness to play those roles. So we can forgive ourselves and, finally relax with ourselves, understanding that the sacred center really is here. Now.

An Exercise for Growing Empathy

I try to practice what I preach; I’m not always that good at it but I really do try. The other night, I was getting hard-hearted, closed-minded, and fundamentalist about somebody else, and I remembered this expression that you can never hate somebody if you stand in their shoes. I was angry at him because he was holding such a rigid view. In that instant I was able to put myself in his shoes and I realized, “I’m just as riled up, and self-righteous and closed-minded about this as he is. We’re in exactly the same place!” And I saw that the more I held on to my view, the more polarized we would become, and the more we’d be just mirror images of one another—two people with closed minds and hard hearts who both think they’re right, screaming at each other. It changed for me when I saw it from his side, and I was able to see my own aggression and ridiculousness.

--Pema Chodron, Practicing Peace in Times of War

I find Chodron's words compelling and also somewhat daunting. After all, the path from recognizing hard-heartedness and closed-mindedness to practicing perspective-taking is often messy and challenging. Additionally, members of marginalized social groups and others in one-down positions often perceive that those who dominate preach about stepping in another's shoes but, when it comes time to do so, project their own experience onto that "other," thereby engaging in a kind of false empathy that maintains repressive power.* What, then, does "standing in someone else's shoes" in ways that contribute to peace and equity look, sound, and feel like? What does authentic perspective-taking mean in concrete terms?

One way to begin cultivating such empathy is to consider the extent to which our perceived reality actually represents a projection of our internal world. Cheri Huber offers a helpful definition of projection:

"Projection" is the notion that everything mirrors who we are. We always see ourselves when we look out at the world and other people. It is not possible to see something that is not a part of ourselves.

Her last statement serves as a radical truth if we take it to heart, as perceptions of an us versus them world quickly fall apart when we accept that we can only recognize in others what also resides within. It is not possible to see something that is not part of ourselves.

Even if we do recognize the extent to which our perceptions are projections, we still are left to transform them into a greater understanding of others, the world, and ourselves. Enter the clearing exercise, which is particularly useful for resolving conflict.** When we are at odds with someone, we can "clear the mirror" by following these instructions:

1. 1. Name what bothers you.***
2. 2. Identify how you engage in the behavior that bothers you, too.
3. 3. Brainstorm how that behavior works for you.
4. 4. Brainstorm how it doesn't work for you.
5. 5. Ask the other person what you need around this thing that bothers you.

What I love most about this exercise is how it asks us to remain in an "I" position until the very end, when we have become clearer about what is actually going on and have acknowledged that we are intimately familiar with what "you" do. Also useful is the exercise's attention to the workability of behaviors and habits. In other words, the clearing exercise requires us to depart from a rigid, dichotomous right/wrong framework and engage in more flexible ways of thinking. The actions that harm others and ourselves are often misguided attempts at protection, and this exercise helps us to uncover that truth. For example, if what bothers us is our counterpart's insistence on being right, steps two through four help us to see that "being right" often amounts to grasping for stability and security when we feel afraid of uncertainty or overwhelmed by the changing nature of this living and dying world. Thus by the time we arrive at step five, we are more apt to ask the other person for increased openness and vulnerability rather than demand that they stop being self-righteous. We also are more likely to make our request in a soft manner that is easier to hear than an accusatory, blaming demand. Step five thus presents an opportunity to model the openness and vulnerability we desire from the other person.

Practices like the clearing exercise foster our evolutionary potential for connection, understanding and love. But don't just take my word for it. Try it with your loved ones and, eventually, your "enemies."

There is nothing like a haiku to get to the heart of the matter, so I'll close with Eric Micha'el Leventhal's:

Each person you meet is an aspect of yourself, clamoring for love.

* I am borrowing this idea of "false empathy" from Garrett Albert Duncan who eloquently described how false empathy plays out in his article on critical race theory and qualitative research.

** Myron Eshowsky taught me this exercise.

*** This step may require a little digging. For example, upset about a roommate/partner repeatedly leaving their dirty dishes in the sink may actually emerge from any number of unmet needs, including but not limited to notions of fairness, respect, parity, mutuality, or accountability.

The life-giving power of speaking "truths"

The things that go without saying go even better when said.

--Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux

In "The Secret that Became My Life," Jane Isay recounts learning about her husband's gay identity after many years of marriage and then staying in the closet with him for many more. About becoming a "full-fledged secret keeper" she writes,

What may start as a simple set of secrets can spread through a person's character like cancer. Keeping a secret demands habitual denial, which gradually may morph in to self-deception, resulting in the diminution of the self...The keeper worries about being found out. The keeper also tries to create an internal story that keeps self-judgment at bay. So we rationalize, and we explain, and we cover over the bright shiny truth. We tell ourselves stories about how much better off everybody is if they are ignorant. The keeper is afraid of change, of retribution, and of being judged.

I appreciate the attention she gives to the toll these secrets take on the secret keeper, as this aspect of secrecy seems central to shifting our belief that life does indeed go better when we speak our little "t" truths.* In other words, secrets harm, and even destroy, the secret keeper. Because they do so from the inside out, the self-injury inflicted by secrecy may go undetected until the damage is widespread.

I have known many people who have well-crafted explanations for why silence must continue about issues like childhood sexual, emotional, and physical abuse, a family member's alcoholism, infidelity, and trans gender identities. Generally, fear is driving the story and often with good reason. We can lose our loved ones, our place in families, our jobs, and other important aspects of our lives and livelihoods when we speak the truth. I appreciate that Isay does not sugarcoat the pain of truth-telling when we have carefully guarded a secret for a long while. She also does not end the story at encountering pain, loss, and conflict; she follows it to healing:

Telling is not simple for secret keepers who have dedicated much time and energy to the secret. It is painful and humiliating to explain feelings and motives under these circumstances. Even if they believe that they kept the secret for good reasons, they feel guilty. Faced with a loved one wanting the truth, people tend to pull back. Yet an honest account of the circumstances that led to the secret is often necessary to begin the process of healing.

One way to discuss the costs of secrecy in non-judgmental terms is to focus on the energy required to hide truths. "Where our attention goes, our energy flows," so we can assess how much attention we give to covering over the important truths of our lives.** Do we try to control not only what we say but also what others share? Do we spend many moments of each day worrying about what will happen if the truth gets out? Do we resort to numerous avoidance strategies--including using drugs and/or alcohol, overworking, and overexercising--to keep our fear of being found out at bay?

If we do indeed spend significant amounts of time and energy safeguarding our truths, we may want to consider how this management of reality amounts to a lot of unlived life. After all, living from a story of fear differs significantly from being present to the life within and around us. More pointedly, chronic fear puts tremendous stress on the body and impedes creativity, connection, and empathy.

Ultimately, secrets close us off from others since trust and intimacy require a high degree of authenticity and vulnerability. They also limit our freedom and wholeness. When we only focus our attention on the possible horrific outcomes of truth-telling, we become blind to the possible benefits of it. Isay beautifully articulates some possibilities engendered by honesty at the end of her story:

Some revelations stop relationships in their tracks. But others reveal the true person in our midst, the imperfect, limping, and often loving soul we cared about so much. And so we continue to care, and together we can rebuild, this time slowly, on a foundation of truth...We have choices in this life, and we make mistakes. Forgiveness is not impossible, and the wholeness of spirit that comes from truth is cool and pure.

* I'm distinguishing little "t" truths from big "T" truths that claim to be absolute.

** I'm borrowing this saying from Tara Brach.

Wild Awakenings Beckon

The basic assumption of Healing Rage is that unresolved rage from childhood trauma is still locked in our bodies and minds. This blocked energy manifests as disguises of rage in our adult lives--ways we cope with life while denying an intimate experience with living. These disguises become such an ingrained part of our existence that we forget that the origins are rage. While our disguises of rage attempt to protect us from the pain of our past, they more often re-create the past and perpetuate the very suffering we seek to avoid. Unresolved rage has been passed on from one generation to the next, contributing to rage inheritances that collectively plague the world, and each of us--whether we know it or not--is charged with transforming this legacy.

--Ruth King

Most of the people with whom I work (including myself) have been or are seriously enraged. As King highlights above, when this rage goes underground, great self-destruction, violence, and even death may occur. Her book, Healing Rage, is one of the best resources I have found to help make sense of this rage and transform it into an inner peace that has the wherewithal to spread outward and, so, contribute to the healing of our world.

King asserts that trauma between the ages of 0 and 12 usually engenders this rage and offers a broad definition of trauma:

an experience of severe emotional shock that causes substantial and lasting damage to our psychological well-being. Trauma is experienced as being intensely overwhelmed by a perceived threat or actual harm. Trauma can be a single incident of devastating loss, violation or injury, or a chronic atmosphere of fear and neglect.

When I reflect on the adult suffering I witness, early trauma is almost always part of the mix. The notion that looking backward amounts to "dwelling on the past" misses the reality that we cannot resolve our rage and generate an "intimate experience with living" until we acknowledge the trauma trapped within us. Only then can we process and let go of the rage and shame, rage's twin emotion according to King. Said differently, when we bury emotions alive, they do not die. We do.*

I appreciate King's attention to how rage manifests in diverse disguises. She identifies six: dominance, defiance, devotion, distraction, dependence, and depression. For example, King writes about defiance,

We know we wear the Defiance disguise of rage when we have a life pattern of anger and battle. Sometimes we battle outwardly with another person, place, or thing. Other times we battle within our mind or against our body. Anger is our way of keeping others, including ourselves, from noting the shame we are feeling.

I picked defiance because it is deeply familiar to me and is common in the academic environments in which I have worked. Although many of us are fighting for social justice, we are still fighting. Although I am imagining the scathing criticisms from several of my colleagues as I write this post, I know King's words to be true:

Defiance has become a way of hiding our shame of needing to be loved. It diverts us from the rage we feel toward our own helplessness and the longing to be honored and respected. Yet we are unable to discern that not everyone is the enemy. We are the last one to know that some wars have ended, and that there are new ways to survive that allow us to remove our armor, rest in our own skin, and heal.

King not only points out the ways that these disguises harm us; she also reveals the wisdom of each disguise, thereby emphasizing the great value embedded within it. About defiance, for instance, she asserts,

When Defiance is not ruled by a pressing anxiety for justice, its bright, warrior spirits can show up with more heart...Truth-telling, courage, freedom of expression, and choice flowing from a compassionate heart--these are the necessities of our spirit. Our keen sense of justice can give us a life of independence and self-respect, and be a gift that unites the world.

Needless to say, I recommend this book to all of us trying to better understand the suffering of others and ourselves. In addition to providing clear explanations, such as the excerpts highlighted above, King offers varied, concrete exercises for healing our rage. I particularly like her chapter on "looking in before acting out." In it, she provides instructions for distinguishing our observations from our interpretations, our pain from our suffering, and projections from feared and denied parts of ourselves. All of these tasks help us to reclaim our rejected experience and, in so doing, to heal. In King's words, "It is our response to what life offers that causes us suffering--not what life offers."

* I'm borrowing this idea of burying emotions alive from Tara Brach's talk "Accessing Innate Wisdom."

On grieving suicide

A very wise mentor explained the paradox of being a human being who continuously loves another, despite the pain of that love, with two Adrienne Rich quotes:

Save yourself; others you cannot save.

The waste of my love goes on this way trying to save you from yourself.*

When someone we love consciously chooses to end their life, how easily we turn on ourselves. "Why didn't I see that as a red flag?" "I should have reached out more." "If I had done something differently, s/he would still be alive." In the stages of grief model, such words represent a kind of bargaining with the reality of our loss. We want to make sense of this tragedy and our role in it.

When we are able to observe these thoughts as part and parcel of our experience with which we do not have to do anything--when we can accept them as elements of this kit and kaboodle called life--a little more breathing room emerges. Those moments when we reject our experience is when our stories of deficit and decay take over and diminish us. We begin managing. Controlling. Doing. Organizing. Performing. We channel our energy toward shoving all that pain--the pain that feels like a tidal wave we cannot possibly survive--into some kind of bottle. We turn away from the belief that the universe can hold us and our pain, if we allow it to do so.

I write today to come back from that place of refusal. To remove my armor and recognize that enough love already resides within to return to the land of the living, where joy and peace accompany the anguish and sorrow. I can choose to live from the inside out--to save myself, for I cannot save others. The waves will continue to come from all directions, but now I know I can bear them. I can even flow with them. On this day of Thanksgiving, when I desperately want to turn toward rather than away from my loved ones, I listened to Tara Brach's interview of Frank Ostaseki, the founder of the Metta Institute.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sml6Z0TMx1k#t=1403

How grateful I am for his wisdom:

Welcome everything. Push away nothing. We don't have to like everything that comes. We just have to meet it...We have to discover something in ourselves that's capable of that kind of welcoming.

What is that something within? I have no doubt it is the ability to practice love. Self-love is not selfish. It saves us when we feel so powerless to save others. It is the thing our grieved one could not find, even though it was there all along, which is the largest source of my anguish. "You stubborn fool! You belonged. You were loved. You touched so many lives. Why, oh why, did you turn a blind eye to yourself!?"

Right now, in this instant, we can halt that line of questioning and turn inward, toward the life still here, with compassion. I find great solace in Ostaseki's rendering of compassion:

Compassion isn't about taking away people's pain...Compassion is that capacity that allows us to stay with what we would otherwise like to get away from, until the real truth, until the real causes of that suffering show themselves. The presence of compassion is that it allows the defenses to fall down. When the defenses fall down, we can see the real causes of the suffering, and we can be of some help.

Such compassion creates the ground for the seeds of belonging, connection, and love to grow. "Why" questions, like the one above, too often engender shame with their incessant and exhausting quest for causes. They tend to breed more controlling. More resistance. More internal warfare. I find "what," "how," and "when" questions more interesting. They present opportunities to connect the mind with the heart, to come back to our embodied experience and the present moment, to arrive at an understanding rooted in love, not rightness.

My own inquiry process goes something like this: What would I have to feel if I stopped bargaining with reality? Oh, there is pain there. I am suffering. It's okay. I pray: May I feel peace again soon. May I remember the love that is here and all around me. May I take myself into my own heart and mind and love this life no matter what. May I embrace every living and dying part of this universe. May I offer my love whether it is accepted, rejected or met with indifference.**

Ultimately, we all must find our own pathway to a love in which we can finally rest. There is no script to follow. We certainly can turn toward friends, family, and professionals for support, and I hope we choose to do so. Isolation, after all, begets more isolation and disconnection. But we cannot force this love to manifest, and we cannot force others to find it. Our grieved one took our breath away with that searing truth. We can, however, listen to others' stories of encountering the love within for some guidance. Here is Ostaseki's:

The most extraordinary thing was discovering the love of my own being...I became much more intimate with it. And that love opened me to a certain kind of trust. Not a trust in others' behavior...It was really a trusting in the unfolding of things. All the things that we imagine we're in charge of. That trust became an abiding trust...It was a deep rest...My whole being at rest. A certain kind of seeking, a very subtle seeking, just stopped.

As I attempt to allow all of the preciousness, precariousness, and pain of this life into my mind, body, and heart, I can feel my inner fire returning to the glow it had before this devastating loss. Slowly by slowly. At times, I sense the vastness of warmth and light that fire can offer. If I let it.

I happily cede the final word to Danna Faulds:

Birthright

Despite illness of body or mind,

in spite of blinding despair or

habitual belief, who you are

is whole. Let nothing keep you

separate from the truth. The soul

illumined from within, longs to

be known for what it is. Undying,

untouched by fire or the storms of

life, there is a place inside where

stillness and abiding peace reside.

You can ride the breath to go there.

Despite doubt or hopeless turns of

mind, you are not broken. Spirit

surrounds, embraces, fills you from

the inside out. Release everything

that isn't your true nature. What's

left, the fullness, light, and shadow,

claim all that as your birthright.

* The first quote comes from "Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law," the second one from "For the Dead."

** Frank and Tara have some wonderful prayer words in their talk on which I am heavily drawing here.

What if we stopped mistaking habits for defects?

Your beliefs become your thoughts, Your thoughts become your words,

Your words become your actions,

Your habits become your values,

Your values become your destiny.

--Mahatma Gandhi

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, "Mental disorders are common in the United States, and in a given year approximately one quarter of adults are diagnosable for one or more disorders." A little digging reveals that this percentage came from a 2005 journal article, which based its survey questions on criteria from the Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders. I like to imagine what the findings might be if someone asked the "9,282 English speaking respondents aged 18 years and older" who took this survey between 2001 and 2003, "What if your disorders are patterned behavior rooted in a false core belief?" To spur reflection, I might even give them the above quote and a list of such beliefs. The following is one list I found in Charlotte Kasl's writing (which comes from other work about the nine Enneagram personality types):

1. There must be something wrong with me.

2. I am worthless.

3. I have an inability to do...

4. I'm inadequate.

5. I don't exist.

6. I'm alone.

7. I'm incomplete, there is something missing.

8. I am powerless.

9. There is no love--it's a loveless world.

Moving from a distant thought experiment about over 9,000 anonymous survey respondents in a study conducted 10 years ago toward an inquiry into the possible connections between our own patterned actions and one or more of the abovementioned false beliefs is harder, scarier, and more vulnerable. However, to borrow from Madeleine L'Engle, "To be alive is to be vulnerable." So here goes...

My personal favorite is false core belief #4. When I have not been able to pause and replace that belief with one grounded in connection, love, and belonging, it has become a destiny in the following ways :

I'm not enough.

Internally: "I should be better than I am." "I'm not going to be able to realize my life goals."  "I can't trust myself to make wise decisions." "I'm a bad person." "I'm not loveable."

To the world: "I don't know what I'm doing." "I'm so sorry I can't do anything right!" "This is all my fault." "I'm a failure." "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry..."

I try to make up for my insufficiency by striving, doing, fixing, managing, controlling. I shoulder responsibility for situations to which I contributed but for which I am not entirely responsible. I keep apologizing and making repairs long after most of the people implicated in my supposed "misstep" have forgotten about it. I add more to my overflowing plate. I withdraw.

I value sadness (i.e. melancholy). Solitude (i.e. isolation). Busyness (i.e. workaholism). Self-soothing (i.e. drinking alcohol).

I am depleted, depressed, lonely, overwhelmed, exhausted.

What's the point in taking a journey down that gloomy road? For one, I can trace back to the core belief and more quickly unhook from it because I know that what feels real and manifests in my life in real ways is often not true.* I also understand that my reality is interpreted, which means I can reinterpret and create a new reality rooted in different beliefs, thoughts, words, actions, and values.

Beliefs in connectedness, belonging, and love can seem abstract and sentimental when we have not had much experience generating a destiny from them. For those of us not surrounded and filled up with those beliefs in our childhoods and other cultural contexts where we have spent the bulk of our time, how do we bring them to life?

I recently read Andrew Solomon's chapter on transgender children in Far from the Tree. A mother in there, Carol, illustrated an acceptance, appreciation, and love for her child that I believe we can learn to offer to ourselves, as adults, in the service of generating more wholehearted destinies. So far as I can tell, replacing a false core belief with a life-giving one requires paying the kind of attention to ourselves that Carol paid to her daughter Kim:

[Solomon] said, "Do you wish that Paul had just been happy to be Paul and had stayed that way?" Carol said, "Well, of course I do. It would have been easier for Paul, and for the rest of us. But the key phrase in there is 'happy to be Paul.' He wasn't, and I am just so glad that he had the courage to do something about it. No, if he had been happy to be Paul, anybody would wish for that, but since he wasn't--I can't imagine the courage that it took. I had somebody say this weekend, 'Carol, Paul died, and I haven't finished mourning that.' I don't feel that. Kim is much more present to people than Paul ever was. Paul was never rude, he just wasn't totally present. We didn't quite have his attention." She laughed, then said with adoring emphasis, "And look what we got! Kim!" And grace seemed to be both the cause and consequence of her happiness in that emphatic declaration.

* As Tara Brach said, "We pay attention so that we can begin to loosen that thick cluster that really can define our lives."

And by failure, I meant unforgiven...

Being this moment is who we are. In being the awakened life we are, our practice effort is noticing what blinds us. These blinders are self-centered emotion--thoughts interwoven in forms, conceptions, and sensations. Practice effort may be defined as labeling thoughts and being bodily present, as noticing strategies and experiencing...If we are unclear, we may think practice is about making things better, about changing and improving. Though improvements may occur, they are not the aim of the practice.

--Elihu Genmyo Smith

Because I present myself as a recovering perfectionist, I have had the honor and challenge of working with several clients who also identify with this label. For me, the difficulty of this collaboration resides in an intimate understanding of how fearing failure can create impenetrable fortresses, within and beyond the therapeutic setting. Needless to say, working with perfectionists as a perfectionist means clients frequently hold up an obvious mirror to my face. I do my best to meet what reflects back at me. Admittedly, I sometimes run away until I have calmed my fears or can only be with the reflection for a few moments at a time before my own carefully crafted walls start creeping up, around, and over me, doing their best to safeguard my soft underbelly. The moments of staying with that reflection, without doing anything with or to it, have taught me the following about the blinders of perfectionism:

When we repeatedly and consistently pummel ourselves for our imperfections, the hardest part of our humanity often surfaces in an effort to protect us.  Although we are hurting, those with whom we are in relationship may only see a severe, glaring mask and so withdraw from us or react with their own venom to this perceived enmity. In the moment we most crave connection, we inadvertently create barriers to it. That is what defense mechanisms do; they produce the very phenomenon against which we are trying to defend. Unfortunately, we miss the chance to connect when we harden since bonding in an authentic way requires that we take the armor off and show ourselves to the world, vulnerabilities and all. As Ash Beckham said in her TEDxBoulder talk, "If you want someone to be real with you, they need to know that you bleed, too."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSR4xuU07sc

How do we open and soften to others in the face of the failure specter? My fellow perfectionists, I write with the utmost sincerity when I say that acknowledging our own suffering begins the pathway to healing. We cannot let down the barricades to others until we open to our own experience with curiosity, friendliness, and tenderness. Said differently, we start the recovery process by saying to ourselves, "I'm sorry"--not to apologize but to show care and concern toward the pain within. We begin saying yes to our experience and the life that is here by forgiving it.*

If these words spur all sorts of judgments toward me or yourself, I ask that you foster curiosity about that inner critic. In my experience, that judge is our best and strongest builder of the blockade that is attempting to protect us but is actually keeping us separate, from others and ourselves. She emerged to help us survive at an earlier point in time. Perhaps she showed up when we could not meet parental expectations as children, no matter how hard we tried. Or maybe she appeared when a primary caregiver told us s/he loved us no matter what but modeled a highly conditional self-love (i.e. was a perfectionist him or herself). Beyond the family, perhaps we went to a highly competitive school or spent a lot if time in social institutions where we repeatedly received the message that any performance below some arbitrary ideal represented a failure:

of character

of achievement

of beauty

of "normalcy."

My point is that although the critic means well, she's not helping us a lot of the time. So we can decide to let her go. But that action is easier said than done. Usually, she's a master of wall-building--after all, she's been at it for a long time--so we need to be very intentional and disciplined about cultivating and then employing another, gentler voice. A question I find useful in the service of letting the inner judge go is, What would I have to face/feel/experience if I suspended my judgment?  Generally, when I contemplate setting down the shield of self-judgment, I find what we therapist types call "primary emotions"--the softer, more vulnerable feelings of fear and sadness. If we allow ourselves to investigate these feelings with friendliness, we may generate enough heart space to begin offering ourselves forgiveness. We may even (dare I say it!) want to replace the incessant criticism with blessings of lovingkindness: May I be happy, be safe, be healthy, live with ease.

In addition to offering forgiveness to myself, I find that unlearning dichotomous, value-laden ways of thinking (right/wrong, good/bad, success/failure) opens doors to more wholehearted ways of approaching this life, which is so much more dynamic and complex than rigid black-and-white thinking allows. As I've written previously, this truth has been so important to my own healing that I tattooed a reminder on my body: "Out beyond ideas of right doing and wrongdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there."

But with what do we replace these binary frameworks? Enter Sharon Salzberg's wisdom, which I recommend reading again and again and again:

the immediate result of an action, and how others respond to it, is only a small part of its value. There are two other significant aspects: the intention giving rise to the an action and the skillfulness with which we perform it. The intention is our basic motivation, or the inner urge that sparks the action. The skillfulness with which we act involves carrying out the intention with sensitivity to and awareness of what might be appropriate in any given situation. While the skillfulness of an action has a great deal to do with the result, it is the intention behind an action that is critically important. We can't control the response to an action. We can do our best to act skillfully, but it is at the level of intention where we make a crucial choice. An action can be motivated by love--or by hatred and revenge. Self-interest can be the source of what we do--or generosity can be. If our intention is wholesome, we can have faith in the workings of interconnectedness to continuously unfold our action, no matter how small or big, in positive ways.

For perfectionists, the "inner urge" driving much action is external approval and/or the achievement of some ideal. But as Salzberg pointed out, we leave a whole lot of our well-being to forces beyond our control when we focus our attention on others' responses and immediate results. What might happen to our actions if we made our intention to forgive ourselves for our imperfections, to offer kindness to ourselves rather than judgment? You will need to try it to believe it, but I know from my own experience that I have oodles more love and compassion to offer outwardly when I can muster friendliness toward myself. I also have more freedom. Moreover, and to circle back to the quote opening this post, I often see the present moment with more clarity when I am forgiving of myself and so remove the blinder of self-judgment. In other words, I tend to act more skillfully from this clear-seeing place that recognizes the "matrix of conditions" influencing this moment.** But that "improved" skillfulness and whatever results it engenders were not the intention. Self-improvement was not the goal. Forgiveness and lovingkindness were.

Once again, we arrive at a question that each of us must answer for ourselves: What stands between me and stripping away "the entangling, unhealthy ways of relating to [myself] with dislike and diminishment"?*** I imagine the answer to this question involves at least some pain that has thus far been covered over. In light of the fact that I permanently placed Rumi's words on my arm, you likely will not be surprised that I am going to close with his words, too:

Don't turn away. Keep your gaze on the bandaged place. That's where the light enters you.

* As usual, Tara Brach heavily influenced this post. For this one, I particularly drew on her retreat talk, "The Heartspace that is Our True Home."

** Here, I again was borrowing from Sharon Salzberg's Faith.

*** More Sharon Salzberg!

Going Wild

You will do foolish things,

but do them with enthusiasm.

--Colette

Two weeks ago, I got hitched. I wrote about showing up and letting others see me, imperfections and all, in my last post. My wedding day delivered quite an unexpected opportunity to put these words into practice.

A dreamy outdoor ceremony kicked off the day and involved heart-warming shows of love and support for my partner, our relationship, and me. Because the rain and wind would not quit, we exchanged our vows under a tent that provided an ineffable intimacy.

Thereafter, when the dance floor started hopping, I was way into it. First, I got to rock out to the song I performed in my sixth-grade talent show, Aerosmith and RUN-DMC's "Walk this Way," with a wonderful friend from my Peace Corps days. I also struck out to find my adorable and adored friend who can do the worm. She has pulled off this feat on numerous occasions with amazing precision and grace, and I had requested in advance that she perform her best dance-floor deed on my big day.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4B_UYYPb-Gk

The fact that she is in her early 40s is important to the story because her awesome undulations momentarily contributed to a comparison that was not at all useful: If she can do the worm, I, a 38-year-old woman, can still do the splits. Never mind that I last actualized this exploit several years ago, experienced a fair amount of stress and limited sleep in recent days, and, perhaps most importantly, spent much of the day shivering in the cold. By golly, I was going to do the splits on the dance floor, AND I was going to make sure I made my move in front of the camera. So I tracked down our lovely photographer, and Sharon cheerfully prepared herself for my performance. I went down. Nothing felt good about the movement, but I got up without too much ado. Looking crestfallen, Sharon informed me that she had not captured the Kodak moment.

My chance to practice what I preach had arrived! I could pause. I could listen inwardly and hear my pissed off body say, "Don't you ever do that to me again!" I could heed that voice and resume dancing in a way that honored my body's current state. The show would go on and be just as satisfying without that particular snapshot.

I leapt into the splits with even greater fervor the second time. As I landed, I knew in the farthest reaches of my being that I was done, not only for the night but also for some seeming eternal period of hell. I sort of blacked out for a few minutes after landing on the floor with a horrifying bounce but vaguely remember hobbling to a bag that had pain medication in it and finding my way to a chair on the edge of the dance floor. I tried to be brave and gracious as various loved ones offered me healing words, ice, and, in some cases, drunken, unsolicited advice. Like Cheryl Strayed when she lost her hiking boot on the Pacific Crest Trail, I kept imagining I was the butt of a practical joke. The throbbing pain would cease and desist, and I would resume my merriment. As she wrote, "But no one laughed. No one would. The universe, I'd learned, was never, ever kidding. It would take whatever it wanted, and it would never give it back." My hamstring was toast. No amount of wishing I could redo my foolish act would miraculously heal my broken body.

Once again, I confronted an opportunity to walk my talk and show myself some compassion. I could replace the inner judge, who had begun to chatter intensely and rapidly about how stupid and ridiculous I was, with lovingkindness blessings like, "May your leg heal quickly. May you feel at ease." I could recognize I made a mistake and repeat to myself the Brene Brown quote I intentionally placed front and center on my website: "Imperfections are not inadequacies; they are reminders that we're all in this together."

The critic grew louder. I sat in the chair, the blood now drained from my face, still trying to be brave and gracious as the songs I selected for the DJ played on and people continued to rock out within reach of my stationary post. I did not want anyone to suffer with me, but I sure longed to be out there in the heart of it all. When Billy Joel's "Just the Way You Are" came on, I could no longer could keep the tears in check. My partner and I had crooned to this song on a road trip early in our relationship. When I picked the tune, I envisioned us dancing to it, close and slow, on our big day.  As tears streamed down my face, the internal voice of gloom and doom grew louder: "You not only screwed this up for yourself, you big fat idiot, but you also are ruining the party for the people keeping you company on the sideline."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaA3YZ6QdJU

Happily, my wise aunt appeared on the scene and told me to sock my pride. She is fond of the saying, "My mind is making promises my body can't keep," because she has made some of those promises herself. Her understanding provided a saving grace. A friend found my partner, who was in the other room conversing with cousins he rarely sees, and reported that I needed him. When he arrived, I told him I wanted to go to the emergency room; what I managed to accomplish on the dance floor was no joke.

At this point, my out-of-town father left the reception to get the rented van, located five blocks away at his hotel, so he could drive me to the hospital. My partner's former roommate carried me up and out of the building to wait for the van. Unbeknownst to me, my sister had taken a cab to the 24-hour Walgreens to purchase crutches and appeared with them in hand. My inner critic went hog wild in the face of all this grace. I started apologizing profusely to everyone around me, begging them to go back to the party. "Abandon the wounded bride; leave her to self-made pity party!" I almost shouted (I turn to third-person voice when I am being particularly hard on myself).

To make a long story short, my dad got lost after taking a wrong turn out of the hotel parking lot. The wait for him grew more and more unbearable until my partner and I decided to take a cab by ourselves to the ER--a sort of symbolic separation from our families of origin, although I certainly did not see the irony of our departure at that time. Thankfully, the ER was pretty much empty. The various health providers I ran into appreciated the story about why I had appeared on the scene all gussied up and someone put a warm blanket over me. I almost passed out from relief. I got the prescription-strength drugs I was after and reassurance that although I likely tore my hamstring, the tendon had not appeared to rip away from the bone.

We got back in a cab and headed to the bed and breakfast where my aunts had paid for a beautiful room for our wedding night. The room was located at the top of a winding set of stairs. I surrendered my hope of arriving there. "Let's just go home," I sighed to my partner. We were going to do no such thing he informed me gently. He gingerly hoisted me over his shoulder and carried my whimpering self to our sought-after destination. This feminist never imagined being carried across a threshold on my wedding night. Alas, the universe had other plans for me.

Although in the days that followed, the judge took up her fair share of minutes and hours, I came back to the practices I consistently recommend to my clients. I allowed myself to view my injury as a loss without comparing myself to all the people in the world who have it so much worse than me. Because I named the injury a loss, I could grieve it and move on. Whenever I mustered the presence of mind to do so, I also allowed rather than rejected my moment-to-moment experience, acknowledging, processing, and letting go of the numerous feelings and thoughts that arose. I remembered Tara Brach's phrase, "Where your attention goes, energy flows," and focused my attention on the gratitude I felt for the people who came to my aid without resentment or expectation, only love. I reframed the event as an impassioned moment of glee--a misdirected one, to be sure, but not a tell-tale sign that I sucked as a human being, daughter, sister, friend, and partner. I reread one of my favorite Danna Fauld's poems, "Allow":

There is no controlling life.

Try corralling a lightning bolt,

containing a tornado. Dam a

stream and it will create a new

channel. Resist, and the tide

will sweep you off your feet.

Allow, and grace will carry

you to higher ground. The only

safety lies in letting it all in--

The wild and the weak; fear,

fantasies, failures and success.

When loss rips off the doors of

the heart, or sadness veils your

vision with despair, practice

becomes simply bearing the truth.

In the choice to let go of your

known way of being, the whole

world is revealed to your new eyes.

Turning loving attention toward my experience remains an ever challenging practice. This particular episode continues to represent what one of my mentors calls (and don't read on if swearing offends you) "another fucking growth opportunity." But I am growing. I keep thinking about the many moments during my wedding day when I felt connection, beautifully defined by Brene Brown as "the energy that is created between people when they feel seen, heard, and valued; when they can give and receive without judgment." I am healing, not just my body but also my spirit. Sufficiency is my reality, and I wake up each day aspiring to strengthen my belief in that radically transformative truth.

We Belong

Belonging is the innate human desire to be part of something larger than us. Because this yearning is so primal, we often try to acquire it by fitting in and by seeking approval, which are not only hollow substitutes for belonging, but often barriers to it. Because true belonging only happens when we present our authentic, imperfect selves to the world, our sense of belonging can never be greater than our level of self-acceptance.

--Brene Brown

While creating a song list for a certain upcoming celebration, I remembered Pat Benatar's "We Belong." Now the song lyrics do not depict a particularly reciprocal or mutually beneficial relationship. But the song's title. Now that is something I can get behind.

This blog post will be short, as today is the actual day of my wedding. I write this morning both because I cannot sleep and because being surrounded by dear friends and family from near and far gives Brown's words more weight than ever. Despite my roller coaster emotions during the last few days, I feel so much gratitude for this life I have. I also understand more deeply the importance of daring greatly during the time we have on this earth. As Brown wrote,

Daring greatly is not about winning or losing. It's about courage. In a world where scarcity and shame dominate and feeling afraid has become second nature, vulnerability is subversive. Uncomfortable. It's even a little dangerous at times. And, without question, putting ourselves out there means there's a far greater risk of feeling hurt. But as I look back on my own life and what Daring Greatly has meant to me, I can honestly say that nothing is as uncomfortable, dangerous, and hurtful as believing that I'm standing on the outside of my life looking in and wondering what it would be like if I had the courage to show up and let myself be seen.

May I have the courage today to show up and let myself be seen, imperfections and all, so that I can experience not only the love all around me but also the sense of true belonging of which Brown speaks.

Since people keep telling me I can do as I wish on this day, I might as well close with some Rumi!

Lovers don't finally meet somewhere.

They're in each other all along.

Going Back to the Triangle

My, oh my, am I hearing a lot of blaming these days! A Time article title sums up the current U.S. blame game: "In New Poll, Americans Blame Everyone for Government Shutdown." Although I have already written about the Karpman triangle (also called the drama triangle) elsewhere, I know I am yearning for a reminder of what life can look like when people are "proactive rather than reactive, self responsible rather than blaming."* The triangle serves to clarify how we get stuck in vicious blaming and shaming cycles within our private and public relationships. Using the triangle, we can unmask an issue and respond to it in more skillful ways. So back to the triangle I go!

Psychiatrist Steven Karpman introduced the triangle in the 1970s. Essentially, the triangle's three points represent the following roles that adults play when engaged in relational power struggles: persecutor, rescuer, and victim. The persecutor seeks to control others via anger, criticism, and blaming, without recognizing the fear driving this abusive behavior. The rescuer tries to control the situation by being helpful, nice, and strong, not seeing that when we try to rescue others from their problems, we prevent them from drawing on their own strengths and resources to resolve issues (i.e. we treat others as victims). The victim also seeks to control others by assuming a position of overwhelm or paralysis in the face of managing his or her life. As victims, we want others to rescue us or whip us into shape.

Importantly, these roles portray a sliver of who we actually are, even if we have grown comfortable in one of them over time and, thus, seemingly inhabited it forever and always. These roles are also dynamic. In other words, we may assume the role of victim in one situation and persecutor in another or morph into a new role when our feelings change about the situation. For example, the rescuer may get tired of saving the day and explode at the victim, thereby shifting to the persecutor role for at least a little while.

The primary problem with hopping on the triangle is that we give up our power. We forget about our capacity to utter the following words,

I'm responsible for what I think, do, say. If something bothers me, it is my problem. If you can do something to help me with my problem, I need to tell you, because you can't read my mind. If you decide not to help me, I'll need to decide what I'm going to do next to fix my problem. Similarly, if something bothers you, it is your problem. If there is something I can do to help you with your problem, you need to tell me. And if I decide not to help you with your problem, you can work it out. You may not handle it the way I might, but you can do it. I don't need to take over.

In current U.S. society, I perceive a lot of persecutory public speech, whether on Facebook walls or CNN. I also sense a lot of self-rescuing via various disengagement strategies, such as drinking alcohol, smoking marijuana, taking prescription pills, over-eating, and watching TV or playing video games for hours on end. These strategies often come to the fore when we are feeling overwhelmed and just want Calgon to take us away (aka assuming the victim stance).

Staying present, engaged, and self-responsible is hard. Really hard. But the benefits of manifesting this aspiration overwhelmingly outweigh the costs to others, ourselves, and our planet. Those benefits include a sense of connection and belonging--of feeling seen, heard, and valued and that we are part of something larger than us.** Such a sense of connection and belonging ultimately removes the thrill of persecuting, rescuing, and staying in the one-down position. In Robert Taibbi's terms, when we step off the triangle, we "can be responsible and strong, and yet honest and vulnerable. [We] can take risks, are not locked in roles, and, hence, can be more open and intimate."

Leave it to a 16-year-old young woman to show us what leaving the triangle behind can look, sound, and feel like. As Malala Yousafzai said in response to Jon Stewart's question, "When did you realize the Taliban had made you a target?"

I used to think that the Talib would come, and he would just kill me. But then I said, 'If he comes, what would you do Malala?' Then I would reply to myself, 'Malala, just take a shoe and hit him.' But then I said, 'If you hit a Talib with your shoe, then there would be no difference between you and the Talib. You must not treat that much with cruelty and that much harshly. You must fight others but through peace and through dialogue and through education.' Then I said I will tell him how important education is and that 'I even want education for your children as well.' And I will tell him, 'That's what I want to tell you, now do what you want.'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjGL6YY6oMs&feature=kp

* This quote and the next comes from Robert Taibbi's Doing Couple Therapy. I also drew heavily on Taibbi's book in the following portrayal of the Karpman triangle.

** See Brene Brown's Daring Greatly for more on the human need for love, connection, and belonging.

On the relationship between gratitude and joy

In Daring Greatly, Brene Brown introduced the concept of foreboding joy:

In a culture of deep scarcity--of never feeling safe, certain, and sure enough--joy can feel like a setup...We're always waiting for the other shoe to drop...Some of us...scramble to the bleakest, worst-case scenario when joy rears its vulnerable head, while others never even see joy, preferring to stay in an unmoving state of perpetual disappointment...Both of these ends of the continuum tell the same story: Softening into the joyful moments of our lives requires vulnerability...We're trying to beat vulnerability to the punch. We don't want to be blindsided by hurt. We don't want to be caught off-guard, so we literally practice being devastated or never move from self-elected disappointment....When we spend our  lives (knowingly or unknowingly) pushing away vulnerability, we can't hold space open for the uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure of joy.

Alas, we once again have come up against the reality that our controlling self, which is trying its hardest to protect us, prevents us from experiencing joy more fully. In the case of foreboding joy, Brown offers a lovely solution: gratitude. In her words:

For those welcoming the experience, the shudder of vulnerability that accompanies joy is an invitation to practice gratitude, to acknowledge how truly grateful we are for the person, the beauty, the connection, or simply the moment before us...Yes, softening into joy is uncomfortable. Yes, it's scary. Yes, it's vulnerable. But every time we allow ourselves to lean into joy and give in to those moments, we build resilience and we cultivate hope. The joy becomes part of who we are, and when bad things happen--and they do happen--we are stronger.

A brief video appearing on Upworthy powerfully shows the human experience of increasing happiness via gratitude. I highly recommend taking the time to watch this 7-minute video since words cannot do justice to the sight and sound of the "experiment" featured in it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHv6vTKD6lg

That said, one story in Daring Greatly brings to life this connection between joy and gratitude:

A man in his early sixties told me, "I used to think the best way to go through life was to expect the worst. That way, if it happened, you were prepared, and if it didn't happen, you were pleasantly surprised. Then I was in a car accident and my wife was killed. Needless to say, expecting the worst didn't prepare me well at all. And worse, I still grieve for all of those wonderful moments we shared and that I didn't fully enjoy. My commitment to her is to fully enjoy every moment now. I just wish she was here, now that I know how to do that."

Another powerful way into both recognizing the inherent vulnerability of being human and feeling gratitude for our lives is a Hawaiian healing practice called ho'oponopono, which I learned from Tara Brach. Although seemingly simple, this practice invites us to believe some thoughts we may very well resist. More specifically, it asks us to acknowledge and show compassion toward our pain and fear. It also asks us to view ourselves as worthy of being cherished. The practice involves saying to ourselves the following phrases:

I'm sorry.

I love you.

Thank you.

When I work with clients, I recommend saying these words even when we do not yet believe them because they begin to rewire the brain's neural pathways. In other words, we begin to interrupt the scarcity and fear driving foreboding joy with the compassion, love, and gratitude that feed sympathetic joy. For those of us who have deep circuits of negativity and fear, creating alternative pathways can be a slow, long process. The good news is that our frustration about unlearning the core beliefs that do not serve us well (e.g., "I am undeserving"; "I am inadequate"; "I am a terrible person") provides yet another opportunity to practice ho'oponopono! Compassion, dignity, and gratitude are within us and so accessible whenever we have the presence to turn toward them. Moreover, turning toward them strengthens the aspiration and actuality of healing ourselves.

Manifesting Peace*

Vengeance is a lazy form of grief.

In the movie The Interpreter, a fictional ethnic group, the Ku, who live in a fictional country, Matobo, engage in a thought-provoking practice. As protagonist Silvia Broome says,

The Ku believe that the only way to end grief is to save a life. If someone is murdered, a year of mourning ends with a ritual that we call the Drowning Man Trial. There's an all-night party beside a river. At dawn, the killer is put in a boat. He's taken out on the water, and he's dropped. He's bound so that he can't swim. The family of the dead then has to make a choice. They can let him drown or they can swim out and save him. The Ku believe that if the family lets the killer drown, they'll have justice but spend the rest of their lives in mourning. But if they save him, if they admit that life isn't always just...that very act can take away their sorrow.

Silvia also utters the statement opening this post about vengeance being a lazy form of grief. Regardless of whether the above description comes from someone's imagination or a "real" practice (after all, they are both human constructions), I find her words about revenge and the Drowning Man Trial to be instructive. They suggest that we tie ourselves up in knots, and sometimes cause great harm to others, when we become mired in thoughts about how we have been wronged.

Domination, oppression, and injustice are prevalent and very real, particularly for the most vulnerable individuals and communities. Like many others, I would like our world and society to devote more energy to cultivating dignity, compassion, and empathy so that we may create more peace and less war, within ourselves and between people. But how do we do this?

Tara Brach often says, "Where our attention goes, our energy flows." If our attention goes to avenging injustices, our energy will flow toward strategic planning and violence. If our attention goes to alleviating the suffering caused by injustices, our energy will flow toward understanding the matter more fully and clearly before choosing our response. After all, reaching for a weapon, whether physical or verbal, suggests we do not have other tools at our disposal to restore a sense of well-being and peace.

But this "peace work" is so much harder than abstract language suggests. When we feel wronged, we want our lives restored to "rightness." And that is the rub. Oftentimes, without recognizing what has happened, we insert a lot of expectations into the restorative process that are rooted in a moral philosophy of rightdoing and wrongdoing. Unfortunately, this good/bad view of the world automatically deletes a lot of context and history that could assist us in gaining more clarity about the various forces contributing to the situation. Those forces need our attention if we aspire to restore a sense of wholeness, of integrity, with our response. What is more, this narrow view takes us away from the present moment and into our stories of how life "should" be. In contrast is "living without an agenda":

Could our minds and our hearts be big enough just to hang out in that space where we're not entirely certain about who's right and who's wrong? Could we have no agenda when we walk into a room with another person, not know what to say, not make the person wrong or right? Could we see, hear, feel other people as they really are? It is powerful to practice this way, because we'll find ourselves continually rushing around to try to feel secure again--to make ourselves or them right or wrong. But true communication can happen only in that open space.**

As usual, my own personal experience has drawn me to this topic of manifesting peace. Back in June, I wrote about my upcoming wedding. Since that time, I have come face to face with old family wounds and realized just how much sorrow I have been carrying around. I most certainly have turned to vengeance--in the form of lashing out with harsh words--when the grief has felt too overwhelming or shameful, and particularly when a lot of external stressors are present. Inspired by Old School, I have been only half-joking about carrying a horse tranquilizer gun at the wedding so I can take action if the going gets too tough.

But I have found that when I allow myself the time and space to dig below the anger, frustration, and judgments, the vulnerable sorrow at the root of things becomes a conduit for connecting with family members and the human experience more broadly. As uncomfortable as it is, I have been attending to and befriending my grief. As a result, I am better understanding the intergenerational nature of my family wars as well as the conditions that foster a sense of separation and brokenness. That understanding, combined with my aspiration to pay "wholehearted, intelligent attention,"**  has allowed me to begin to grow peace within and with individual family members. In conversations, that peace-making has involved attentive, non-defensive listening and generated validation of our own and the other's experience as well as compassion for the suffering that is present, regardless of whose suffering is there. Slowly but surely, I am arriving at the expansive freedom beneath the mourning, to which the Drowning Man Trial speaks. When I am able to stay present and arrive at that open space of "true communication," I encounter the love and tenderness that were there all along.

Pema Chodron gets the final word on how, in our daily lives, we can turn toward and foster peace-making:

When you wake up in the morning and out of nowhere comes the heartache of alienation and loneliness, could you use that as a golden opportunity? Rather than persecuting yourself or feeling that something terribly wrong is happening, right there in the moment of sadness and longing, could you relax and touch the limitless space of the human heart? The next time you get a chance, experiment with this.**

* This piece draws heavily on Tara Brach's September 11, 2013 talk "Peace Work."

** These quotes come from Pema Chodron and appear in The Pocket Pema Chodron.

Fear as our anticipation of loss

Fear is the anticipation of loss.

--Tara Brach

Perhaps you see the above quote and think, "Duh. Tell me something I don't already know!" Or perhaps you see those six words as a gateway to unraveling a lifetime of fleeing, fighting, and freezing. The latter was my experience.

Fear threads through so much in U.S. society. Right now, for example, our public eye seems attuned to the triple threat of a war with Syria, yet another mass shooting, and Miley Cyrus's VMA performance. I am curious what happens when we frame these events as haunting reminders of loss and ask the question, What am I afraid of losing if we attack another country? I watch the news? I read another scathing critique?

Another way into this idea that fear foreshadows loss is to consider the question: What would I have to face if I stopped running from (as well as chasing or numbing to) fear? If most of us pause--really pause--and explore this question with openness and curiosity, I am confident we will come up against various kinds of loss. Loss of job security or the job itself. Loss of a sense of control over our loved ones and/or ourselves. Loss of the story we have long told ourselves about how our lives are supposed to go. Loss of our health. Loss of a friend, family member, or relationship. Loss of our own lives. Just to name a few.

Fine. I fear loss. So what? The major issue at hand is how fear can shut us down so that we walk through the world as a shell of ourselves, missing out on the joy, peace, and wonder that accompany fear and loss. Although fear is a natural reaction to threat, the amazing human mind can use our thoughts to make fear a monster in a never-ending horror show.

When considering the extent of fear's power to suppress our happiness, creativity, and spontaneity, I find Jaak Panksepp's studies of rat pups particularly compelling. As he wrote,

In this experiment, young rats were first allowed five-minute play periods on four successive days, and then on the fifth, half were exposed to a small tuft of cat hair on the floor of their 'playroom.' During that session, play was completely inhibited. The animals moved furtively, cautiously sniffing the fur and other parts of their environment. They seemed to sense that something was seriously amiss...following a single exposure to cat odor, animals continued to exhibit inhibition of play for up to five successive days.

A small tuft of cat hair extinguished previously vigorous play even though the cat was nowhere to be seen. How many of us go through our days hidden and afraid in anticipation of a bogeyman that does not actually exist? And, again, what are we afraid of losing?

In my own life, I've recently come up against fear as the anticipation of loss in the realm of a beloved pet's illness. Like many people in the U.S., I rely on my domesticated creatures for comfort and simple love. I used to judge myself for doting on my two cats, but I think our material and emotional devotion to our pets in this country is a sociocultural phenomenon related to our growing sense of social disconnection and simultaneous craving for a connection with living organisms outside ourselves. Like Donna Haraway, I agree that we can learn from this inter-species encounter. As she wrote, "Today, I think we have an obligation to learn from dogs. I think that we can become better human beings by paying attention to the relationships we're in with dogs. Together we can not only survive, but flourish. We can learn to be present and to be real."

I'm going to apply her argument to my 9-year-old cat, Chopper, who has taught me to be more "present and real" in recent months on account of his struggle with cancer.

As I have deliberated what treatments to pursue and the likelihood that he will come out of this thing cancer-free, I have come up against an intense fear of his eminent death. I have wanted all of this to just go away and, at times, avoided Choppypants, as we lovingly call him, because the fear and sadness feel overwhelming. Yet Chopper keeps showing up (he currently is insisting on being in my lap), practically yelling at me to remember, "I'm here right now! Play with me and stop dwelling on all the bad stuff that might happen, down the road, in some story you're calling 'The Future.'" He is teaching me to stay with my fears and sadness--to allow them so they have the space to do their thing and then go on their merry way. After all, emotions have a biochemical lifetime of 90 seconds when we do not use our thoughts to create a lifetime movie.*

Chopper is also reminding me, "Love is what we were born with. Fear is what we learned here."** In unlearning my old relationship with fear, I am finding I can return to the love that was always here and is available in the furry mass on my lap right now.

*  I borrowed this tidbit of knowledge from neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor.

** These are Marianne Williamson's words.

Reflecting on Quietness

Whoever you are, bear in mind that appearance is not reality. Some people act like extroverts, but the effort costs them energy, authenticity, and even physical health. Others seem aloof or self-contained, but their inner landscapes are rich and full of drama. So the next time you see a person with a composed face and a soft voice, remember that inside her mind she might be solving an equation, composing a sonnet, designing a hat. She might, that is, be deploying the powers of quiet.

― Susan Cain

For several years I have been drawn to the meditative possibilities of quiet. When I was a teacher, I introduced students to the Quaker practice of not speaking unless we could improve upon the silence, particularly when discussing controversial issues. The rationale for this activity was that silence holds rich possibilities for insight and deepened understanding when we allow it to exist; to listen inwardly and hear the voice of wisdom residing there, we often need to get quiet. I found our classroom dialogues to be more intentional and meaningful when students paused and reflected on the quality of their thoughts before speaking. The binary framework of "right" and "wrong" responses also began to dissolve, allowing for more flexible and creative thinking and expression.

We often receive mixed messages on quietness in U.S. society, especially in educational settings. At school, many of us learn to be silent when the instructor is speaking. In contrast, a teacher may dock us participation points if we remain silent during periods when we have been instructed to engage in interactive activities or to raise our hands with the "right" answer. Whether viewed positively or punitively, silence becomes evaluated in such a context. Quiet no longer just is.

As an educator, one of my favorite things to do on the first day of class was to ask students to become curious about their verbal participation. If they felt compelled to speak, and even interrupt their peers, what was that about? Did they fear invisibility if they were not heard? Did they think they had more important things to say than their classmates? Did anxiety drive their need to share their thoughts? Conversely, if they sat back and observed others speaking, did they view this observation as a different kind of participation? Did they fear failure or judgment upon speaking? Did they want to get their thoughts carefully organized in their heads before uttering any words aloud? Once they became aware of their participation style, students could more freely choose how to contribute to the group space. Frequently, those urgent to speak started to sit back and listen more. And in the new space that opened up, those hesitant to speak would risk sharing their ideas with the group more frequently. I've found this same line of inquiry to be particularly useful with couples and other dyads engaged in a talker-quiet one dynamic that really does not work for either of them.

A major barrier to engaging in such open-ended investigations is the high value we place on being a "good talker" in the United States. In her book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, I appreciate Cain's focus on creating communities where we can share our strengths and talents, without having to sacrifice significant parts of ourselves. As she writes,

Introverts need to trust their gut and share their ideas as powerfully as they can. This does not mean aping extroverts; ideas can be shared quietly, they can be communicated in writing, they can be packaged into highly produced lectures, they can be advanced by allies. The trick for introverts is to honor their own styles instead of allowing themselves to be swept up by prevailing norms.

If we can suspend our judgments about what constitutes a "good" personality, presentation, or style, there really is room enough for us all and infinite ways to approach this precious life. What is more, we have so much to learn from each other when we grow curious enough to investigate the reality behind the appearance, whatever that appearance may be. I cannot improve upon the beauty of Mary Oliver's words about honoring our own authenticity and so leave you with "The Journey":

One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice -- though the whole house began to tremble and you felt the old tug at your ankles. "Mend my life!" each voice cried. But you didn't stop. You knew what you had to do, though the wind pried with its stiff fingers at the very foundations, though their melancholy was terrible. It was already late enough, and a wild night, and the road full of fallen branches and stones. But little by little, as you left their voices behind, the stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds, and there was a new voice which you slowly recognized as your own, that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world, determined to do the only thing you could do -- determined to save the only life you could save.

The Possibilities Engendered by Opening and Softening

We are here to awaken from our illusion of separateness.

--Thich Nhat Hanh

Once upon a time, a very wise woman said to me, "The primary goal of open systems is to understand. Closed systems, on the other hand, aim to protect." These words profoundly changed my life. As usual, I'm starting from the end of the story and need to back up.

For starters, what are open and closed systems? I like Ludwig von Bertalanffy's portrayal of an open system as a system that permits interactions between its internal parts and the surrounding environment. Ultimately, this exchange allows the system's components, and so the larger system itself, to be transformed. In contrast, closed systems establish and maintain isolation from their environments. Because "no material enters or leaves it," a closed system is easier to predict and control. Importantly, von Bertalanffy concludes, "Every living organism is essentially an open system. It maintains itself in a continuous inflow and outflow, a building up and breaking down of components." Every living organism is essentially an open system.

Perhaps you see where I'm going here. In my line of work, the distinction between open and closed systems seems to capture a lot of what is ailing clients and the spaces in which we live and work. Given that we human beings are open systems, things tend to go awry when we block interactions with each other and the environment, such as when we do not allow external resources to come to our aid or cut off our connection with others.

When I meet someone and discover how hard she works to keep most everything locked inside, or encounter a family system and learn of its many secrets, or inquire into organizational practices and find out that transparency is virtually non-existent and decision-making lies in the province of a select few, my closed system alert goes off. Usually a bit more digging reveals that these closed systems are trying very hard to protect themselves from perceived invaders, and fear is driving the show.

Unfortunately, the achieved safety of closed systems is more often than not a mirage, created from stories of enemies, scarcity, and powerlessness that may feel real but are not actually true. What is more, a natural effect of closing a system that aspires to be open is that it hardens into a fragile, shriveled cast of its original self and severs its connections with the surrounding environment, including the living beings residing there.

The words opening this entry changed my life because I had recently awakened to the idea that love is synonymous with understanding. When love is about listening with an awake heart and embodying the present moment, we can perceive others as they are, rather than as projections of who we want or think them to be. Such understanding is not possible when we seek to isolate ourselves or throw on layers of armor in the service of protection. To borrow from Thich Nhat Hanh, "When we are mindful, deeply in touch with the present moment, our understanding of what is going on deepens, and we begin to be filled with acceptance, joy, peace, and love."

Acceptance, joy, peace, and love. Most people I know want to experience more of these in their lives. I also imagine that most people do not associate these states of being with feeling under siege, diving behind a barrier for cover, or withdrawing into turtle-like shells. Softening and opening to what is actually happening are actions that keep us vital and able to sustain nurturing relationships, not only with others but also ourselves. They also are scary as hell if we have devoted a great deal of energy and time to thickening our shields and sharpening our weapons. So we often need to give ourselves permission to start slowly and keep practicing these courageous acts with patience and kindness. At least I did and still do.

Please do not mistake me as saying that all dangers are a figment of our imagination. Living in an unsafe environment for a prolonged period of time seriously undermines our systems' ability to function and thrive. Moreover, our fight, flight, and freeze responses to aversive environmental stimuli are natural and help us to survive when we are in actual danger.

What I am arguing is that we often could stand to pause when we feel fear or discomfort. If we realize we are confronting false alarms and external forces beyond our control, we could soothe the "inner iguana" living in the ancient part of our brain so that we could return to the present moment and reinhabit it, with awareness and kindness. As Rick Hanson wrote,

Keep helping your body feel less alarmed...continually softening and opening the body, breathing fully and letting go, sensing strength and resolve inside. Alarms may clang, but your awareness and intentions are much larger--like the sky dwarfing clouds. In effect, alarms and fears are held in a space of fearlessness. You see this zig-zaggy, up-and-down world clearly--and you are at peace with it. Try to return to this open-hearted fearlessness again and again throughout your day.

Softening and opening in the face of fear amount to honoring the open systems we are and strengthening them (contrary to the popular idea that softening means weakening). As we soften and open, we stay connected and interact with the world in ways that promote our growth and well-being. We also deepen our understanding of this world and those in it, thereby enlarging the pathway to acceptance, joy, peace, and love.

Charles Bukowski gets the final word with his poem "Bluebird":

there's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out but I'm too tough for him, I say, stay in there, I'm not going to let anybody see you. there's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out but I pour whiskey on him and inhale cigarette smoke and the whores and the bartenders and the grocery clerks never know that he's in there.

there's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out but I'm too tough for him, I say, stay down, do you want to mess me up? you want to screw up the works? you want to blow my book sales in Europe? there's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out but I'm too clever, I only let him out at night sometimes when everybody's asleep. I say, I know that you're there, so don't be sad. then I put him back, but he's singing a little in there, I haven't quite let him die and we sleep together like that with our secret pact and it's nice enough to make a man weep, but I don't weep, do you?

Relating Boundaries and "Hell Nos!" to Self-Compassion

Love is the capacity to take care, to protect, to nourish. If you are not capable of generating that kind of energy toward yourself—if you are not capable of taking care of yourself, of nourishing yourself, of protecting yourself—it is very difficult to take care of another person. In the Buddhist teaching, it’s clear that to love oneself is the foundation of the love of other people. Love is a practice. Love is truly a practice.

So said Thich Nhat Hanh in an interview for Shambhala Sun. To me, this quote captures why we need to establish boundaries and honor our limits--our "hell nos"--in relationships. But perhaps I'm getting ahead of myself since a fairly long and winding path led to this connection between self-love and limit setting...

When I first awoke to the idea that self-love was more than a cliche in a ballad fabulously sung by Whitney Houston, I started looking more closely at my relationships.

http://youtu.be/IYzlVDlE72w

Lo and behold, I was violating my own principles left and right. Although I deemed it a personal shortcoming if I took my frustrations out on my partner, was critical or judgmental toward them, or was otherwise less than perfect (i.e. being human), I had lots of excuses up my sleeve--and experienced plenty of resentment--for their hurtful behavior toward me. I also expected myself to be ever more accommodating of their wants and needs, regardless of whether or not my partner shared that expectation.

Then, on the advice of a therapist, I read Harriet Lerner's Dance of Anger and learned the concept of de-selfing:

Obviously we do not always get our way in a relationship or do everything that we would like to do. When two people live under the same roof, differences inevitably arise which require compromise, renegotiation, and give and take...[De-selfing] occurs when one person...does more giving in and going along than is her share and does not have a sense of clarity about her decisions and control over her choices. De-selfing means that too much of one's self (including one's thoughts, wants, beliefs, and ambitions) is 'negotiable' under pressures from the relationship.

"De-selfing" offered a serious wake-up call. I realized I had taken on the belief, hook, line, and sinker, that pursuing my own dreams was selfish. Thus uncovering my own thoughts, wants, beliefs, and ambitions became a new goal.

Because I was not very practiced in such self-study--I was much more accomplished at judging myself for being self-centered!--I turned to Charlotte Kasl. Her book If the Buddha Dated had lots of gems, including an exercise on setting bottom lines, or "hell nos." Her words illustrated how the act of self-compassion intertwined with the act of putting one's foot down:

Because we want to find the luminous essence within us, because we do not want to repeat painful lessons of the past, because we love ourselves fiercely and want to find a partner who is kind and loving, we commit to what is often called a bottom line. Setting a bottom line means naming the behaviors you will not tolerate in a relationship. Period. Nonnegotiable. If someone crosses the bottom line we stop seeing them--no rationalizing, no excuses. Likewise, we set a bottom line for our own behavior--making excuses for the other person, ignoring responsibilities, sacrificing our values to keep the other person. Honoring our bottom line tests our spiritual resolve.

What I find particularly insightful in this quote is Kasl's emphasis on behaviors. When we set bottom lines with a Buddha-like heart, we are not demonizing, shaming, or blaming others. We are acknowledging that certain behaviors do not contribute to our well-being, whether they are enacted by others or ourselves. We can set bottom lines and still forgive others and ourselves for the harm they/we cause, especially since that harm oftentimes results from a lethal mixture of confusion, judgment, and shame rather than intentional meanness. The difference is that in addition to forgiving, we respond differently to our own pain by no longer making excuses for others and ourselves.* Re-enter from stage left Harriet Lerner with her lovely depiction of responsibility as response-ability:

By 'responsibility,' I do not mean self-blame or the labeling of ourselves as the 'cause' of the problem. Rather, I speak here of 'response-ability'--that is, the ability to observe ourselves and others in interaction and to respond to a familiar situation in a new and different way. We cannot make another person change his or her steps to an old dance, but if we change our own steps, the dance no longer can continue in the same predictable pattern.

I regret to report that responding in "a new and different way" does not prevent loss or pain. Indeed, if our predictable pattern is predicated on de-selfing, we have likely established and maintained ample relationships that deplete rather than nourish us. Therefore, as we start to create emotional boundaries and limits that safeguard and strengthen us, we will likely provoke a reaction in those who are used to us giving in and going along. When we change the dance, we may lose the relationship. That is where the spiritual resolve that Kasl mentions comes in, as well as the words that opened this post. After all, the more we are able to generate energy that takes care of, protects, and nourishes us, the less we will need to negotiate away important parts of ourselves for the sake of keeping a particular relationship. What is more, we will have freed up energy to become more and more skillful at practicing a love that feeds us, those we encounter, and the surrounding world.

The great news is that such energy tends to attract people. Additional good news is that with cultivated clarity and compassion (practice! practice! practice!), we are much more likely to enter into and sustain relationships that are mutually beneficial and life-giving. As for the times in our lives when we feel all alone and so set out to violate our hell nos, we can turn to the immortal words of Tina Fey for inspiration:

May she play the Drums to the fiery rhythm of her Own Heart with the sinewy strength of her Own Arms, so she need Not Lie With Drummers.

* Here I am drawing on the wisdom of Brene Brown: "When we fail to set boundaries and hold people accountable, we feel used and mistreated. This is why we sometimes attack who they are, which is far more hurtful than addressing a behavior or a choice. For our own sake, we need to understand that it's dangerous to our relationships and our well-being to get mired in shame and blame, or to be full of self-righteous anger. It's also impossible to practice compassion from a place of resentment. If we're going to practice acceptance and compassion, we need boundaries and accountability."

Journeying toward Radical Acceptance

As I speak with more people about the possibilities created by radical acceptance, I often hear responses like:

"I want to be a new and improved me, not accept the way I am."

"If I accept the way things are, they will never change."

"Acceptance equals passivity, and I'm not interested in being passive. I'm an activist!"

"Are you suggesting I accept abuse, dominance, and oppression!?!?"

In a society that consistently promotes a linear and hierarchical view of success and change, these statements make a lot of sense. The subtle and not-so-subtle messages we often receive from families, schools, and work places are that if you do not strive to progress up some kind of ladder, you will become stuck or, worse, a failure. And probably a lazy one at that!

As a mentor recently reminded me, we in the United States also frequently carry around a deep-seated view of ourselves as defective, in part due to the dominance of the original sin doctrine. Why would we not want to jump onto the treadmill of self-improvement after internalizing the message that we are inherently bad? What I find interesting is that other cultures, such as that of the Tibetan Dalai Lama, believe something very different. In the Dalai Lama's words,

Every sentient being—even insects—have Buddha nature. The seed of Buddha means consciousness, the cognitive power—the seed of enlightenment...All these destructive things can be removed from the mind, so therefore there’s no reason to believe some sentient being cannot become Buddha. So every sentient being has that seed.

I do not mean to idealize other cultures or to heroify the Dalai Lama. Instead, I find a powerful inquiry to be, "What would my life be like if I truly believed it is sacred?" The idea of Buddha nature relates to radical acceptance in that believing our lives are worth cherishing encourages us to come back to the present moment, see it clearly, and jump into it wholeheartedly. In contrast, when we stay focused on all the ways we stink at this life, we experience only a sliver of it.

"So what the heck do I mean by radical acceptance!?" you may be wondering if you have reached this point. I am drawn to Tara Brach's portrayal of radical acceptance. She describes it as the ability to be with our experience--our internal weather systems--and say, "Okay, this is here, right now." This "letting be" does not mean passivity in the face of harm. Rather, it means recognizing that our wish for something different is at odds with the reality that is here. We can still dare to dream about and pursue change in the world when we accept our moment-to-moment experience. We do so, however, with more clarity about the pathways that liberate and revitalize us rather than lead to more battling, struggling, exhaustion and, ultimately, loneliness and despair. Perhaps a concrete example is in order.

When I was graduate student and, later, a university professor, I spent most of my conscious moments observing the inequities of social institutions, including those of the university where I worked. I oftentimes felt depleted, powerless, and less and less capable of getting out of bed in the morning, an action that usually preceded armoring up for another day of battle. When I would notice my fatigue and depression, I would quickly call on my internal judge, often without realizing it. She would admonish, "You are so ungrateful. What is wrong with you!? You lead a charmed life and should appreciate it. Get it together and stop complaining. Nobody likes a complainer, especially one as privileged as you."

Needless to say, this incessantly playing tape of criticism did not bring me fulfillment, joy, peace, or that much sought after productivity. What did transform my life was a consciously made commitment to begin paying attention to what was going on inside of me, no matter what that was. This commitment required a shift in my belief that I could not acknowledge my own suffering because of the social and economic privileges I had inherited. Once I began to soften and open to my own pain, I recognized the underlying belief that had guided many of my days to that point: my life was not worthy of close study. I began to interrupt this story of entrenched deficiency with the behaviors and words I could muster. I placed my hand on my heart, for example, and began to use lovinkindness blessings when I became aware of dis-ease: "May you be happy. May you be healthy. May you be safe. May you live with ease."

Slowly but surely, I began to recognize how much of my life had been lived in my head. I therefore had missed out on establishing and sustaining important human connections as well as experiencing the wonders and fragility of this living and dying world. I let myself grieve those unlived precious moments and, eventually, became more adept at perceiving and responding with friendliness to my internal weather systems. As the willlingness to honor the sacredness of my own life grew, I began to let go of my belief in some very familiar roles, like that of the oppressor and oppressed. Recognizing how often my own nature changed, I found that using shorthand, static categories for others and myself no longer made sense. These labels, or solid identifications, kept me from arriving at a deeper understanding of what makes people and systems tick and responding to them in more skillful ways.

Of course I continue to be a work in progress, but I now understand at an experiential level how honoring my own life has expanded my ability to honor others'. I can say and mean to a client, "What if there is nothing wrong with you and you just need to take off all those coats that are covering up who you are?"

I also wholeheartedly believe that the "boundary to what you can accept is the boundary to your freedom."* As poet Danna Faulds wrote,

Trust the energy that Courses through you Trust, Then take surrender even deeper. Be the energy. Don't push anything away. Follow each Sensation back to its source In vastness and pure presence.

Emerge so new, so fresh that You don't know who you are.

Be the energy and blaze a Trail across the clear night Sky like lightning. Dare to Be your own illumination.**

* This quote came from Tara Brach's talk "Absolute Cooperation with the Inevitable." ** The excerpts from "Trusting Prana" came from Tara Brach's talk "From Story to Presence."