Good Again

The prompt for my weekly contemplative writing classes a few weeks ago was on when you first knew you were good. The writings out of this prompt were powerful - as often pointing to realizing when we thought we were bad, or told we were bad, as times when we realized or heard we are good.

This writing in particular stuck out to me. Deb Lamers, one of my students, uses many lovely metaphors around goodness, and doesn't mince words about how an early sexual trauma, unfortunately quite familiar to many, changed her sense of inherent worth for a long time.
Read all the way to the end to see how she pairs Catholic School with Alice in Wonderland!

As always, student writings are unedited, presented as is, written in twenty minutes without planning.
Enjoy Deb's tenderness and kindness to herself.
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Once upon a time, I thought I was good. No one ever told me I was, but the way my grandpa and grandma, aunts, and uncles, and even my mother and father treated me, I thought I was good. A good girl.

Love Doesn't Always Make Things Easier

I am humbled to admit that for a long time, I held this against my mother: she struggled to raise me the rest of the way to adulthood alone. 

I have only realized this recently - meaning - I was aware I was angry with her, and upset/disturbed that some things went (on occasion, horribly) wrong in my adolescence. But recently I've come to understand I also associated those feelings with an assumption that somehow she loved me less.

Because if she had loved me more, wouldn't things have gone better?
Wouldn't it have been easier, for both of us if she had loved me more? Enough?
Luckily, just in time for me to see that these beliefs exist, I am able to let them go.

Felt Sense/Thought Sense and Choosing What We Want

On our recent trip to Austin, Texas, my wife asked on a long drive to and from Dallas (long story) what I meant when I refer to "felt sense"*. She'd noted I use it a lot - when I am trying to process something I don't (yet) have words for, when talking about EMDR or TRE or other somatic modalities with therapists and coaches and the like. I even used it quite a bit in the most recent Level III Nalanda Miksang workshop I taught, though it is language more from the Shambhala Art teachings than Miksang.

So what does it mean, she said. Coming from anyone else it might sound airy-fairy, but I know from you it must mean something. What?

Indeed. 

Reaching Across the Gap

There are gaps between everything.

Who we think we are and how we manifest to others.
What we want to get done and what we actually get done.
What we write and how it sounds to ourselves, reading aloud later, and how it sounds to others.

These gaps are natural, normal. But where we have gaps, we often believe we are lacking.

I am about to teach my first week-long writing retreat.
How am I preparing?
Not by reading, not by writing talks. By walking, by shaking, by dancing and stretching.

Shame

Yup. There's no mincing around it. 
This is what has been coming up lately, in my life, in my wife's life, in my students' lives. 
Shame.

When I don't get done what I set out to do (PS I had unrealistic expectations)...
When I make a mistake - or even moreso, a series of mistakes - while teaching or in public...
When I choose to sleep in instead of meditating...
When I procrastinate...
When I feel sexually aroused in a situation I suspect I shouldn't feel that way in...

I feel ashamed.
Shame.
A heavy brick in my belly.
A punch to the gut.
Not a voice, not an inner critic, nothing that conscious or obvious or literal.
I don't THINK it, I FEEL it. In my locked up hips, my tightened legs, my triggered wrists.

More and more I am convinced that this is what Writer's Block, what creative resistance, what perfectionism, what procrastination ALL ARE - shame. Which is the cause and which the effect? Shame is like the fuel that powers the freezer that keeps us locked in one place. Not exercising, not writing, not exploring, not asking - all because some part of us, deep inside, believes we are unworthy. Anytime we make any kind of perceived error, it goes right into the evidence bin - not only have we done wrong, we are wrong.

For a long time, I have contended that Brene Brown's teachings on vulnerability and shame (click here to watch her stunning TED talk) are a perfect compliment to Shambhala's teachings on Basic Goodness (an article here demonstrating how the two are linked). Shame is our biggest block, our most underground and dug-in belief that we are not good. If we believe this, we can't believe we are basically, fundamentally good. We can't believe in bodhicitta, that we are all born awake and with full potential.

Shame is endless in its layers. Luckily my faith is also endless in its depths. Every time I find a new layer - this last week it was seeing that during a live online class I felt ashamed of myself because of technical errors beyond my control! - I react, I work with my body responses (through TRE or breathing) and then I slowly unpack all that was going on there. It can take months or just a moment. Over time, it gets easier to see, and easier to let go of the belief in shame, let go into the belief of my own - and others' - basic goodness.

What do you do when you encounter shame? How do you know it in your body? Do you know it? Does it have a voice? A story? Or is it more undercurrent? What is your relationship to shame and vulnerability?

And if I catch you using these questions, or my exploration, to compare yourself to, and shame yourself with, I'll come right over there and hug you and hold you while you cry. 

That is your punishment. I will mete it out mercilessly.

As Sakyong Mipham likes to say: "Be careful, or I am going to get gentle with you!"

Don't Use Writing To Get Love - Or Anything Else

Heart on Fire, Austin TX

I have been haunted lately by one of Natalie Goldberg's classic mantras:

Don't use writing to get love.

A few weeks ago I got a reminder on yet another even-more-subtle level, that I can't use teaching - nay, anything - to get love, either.
I don't know about you, but I can use just about anything to try and get love.

I am not talking about consciously seeking acceptance or being wanted. I am talking deep, deep down in crevice, corner, inner-child seeking love missile. Empty whole in belly quality. I think I have taken care of it but then I get stressed out and LO! this issue is still there.

The Right To Exist

Enter/ing, LA/Mar Vista, January 2013

I know.

You wouldn't think I struggle with that, now, would ya?
Look: I do important work.
I Believe in What I Do.
People love me.
I am happily married.
I have a great home, great cats, a wonderful life.

And yet.
And yet.
What?

 I am working on one of my memoirs (that's how much I am not sure I have a right to exist - I am writing two memoirs at once at age 35 - I jest, but there's a grain of truth there), and I keep running into my dad. Smack dab into my dad. No matter what I write about him, people say the same thing over and over again:
"Ok. You loved him. I get it. But why?"

An editor. A critique group. Friends. It's a valid point, one I have addressed before even here. But this time around, it comes when I am trying to pile through my control and anger issues, of which I have plethora. As most people do.

And he's right there, right in the center.

Listen. My dad had a hard life. He was adopted, had a single mom with a disabled sister living at home with them, for whom my dad had to rush home from school and care for. He married my mom, a woman who was not always able to function at top notch, didn't get paid enough, and had three kids. He had two heart attacks, got Diabetes and then cancer in his 50's, then died.

Whew. I know, right?

Today, in therapy, we discussed a memory that keeps reeling back into the scene, one that seems to be blocking any specific details of positive memories of me and him. In short (you want the long one? Read the memoir when it comes out!):
We are eating cheese and crackers late at night.
We are discussing why I have missed so much school lately (nervous kid, sick a lot, wanted to be home with him, though I said none of this then).
He tells me I need to go to school more.
He tells me not to be a nervous person.
He says "You are not a nervous person. I need you to not be a nervous person."

My hips and heart and throat get tense just typing that, though it is an ingrained, old and long-processed memory.

What one critiquer said about my memoir is that it is clear I was not allowed to have feelings as a kid.
Yup.
In therapy, we went even deeper:
I wasn't allowed to have feelings.
It wasn't good to have feelings.
And if I couldn't have feelings, I could exist, but only without them.
So if I had them, I have no right to exist.

That's what my child mind heard when my father said that. And it fit with a lot of other messages from him. He was trying his best to keep a sinking ship afloat. He encouraged all three of us kids to be independent, forthright, political, funny. He also disencouraged our emotions.

Like a lot of deeply held (secret, even) beliefs, this one has blocked my other memories because it seems incongruous that my father could both love me and also somehow tell me that I don't have a right to exist. Well, shit. Talk about a mixed message: one I am sure he got when he was a kid (adopted, early divorce, always caring for others) and I am sure he intended to give to us so we could survive. In other words, he meant well.

Today, I could really feel that for the first time ever: the power of this awful idea that I don't have the right to exist, and the deep need I have had for 35 years to justify my existence: through work (yes, sometimes even the amazing work I do, which, don't worry, I won't stop doing but perhaps I'll be happier doing now!). Throughout my relationships. In everyday speech. All the time.

I know I am not alone in this.

Deep down, inside the core, I believe - some part of me believes - I don't have the right to exist. I know I do - meditation, Basic Goodness, you know, lots of good teachings. Not small stuff. But belief takes more work to re-wire.

I don't need reassurance. But I do need to root out that belief and give it a good airing out. Join me, would you? It's time to take the skeletons out and set generations of not believing we have the right to exist free.