memo: to everyone who knew me

Memo: to everyone who knew me when

don’t expect me to be depressed.

He’s not welcome anymore.

 

When you expect depression, I spend a lot of energy fighting gravity.

I’d rather use that energy to keep

re-terraforming my brain,

which is much more rewarding.

 

I know it’s hard.  You have expected depression for so long that expecting is as ingrained as the depression itself.  

You used to come over all the time and find him

with his dirty boots on my coffee table

which he had covered in Dunkin Donuts cups and

old newspapers.

 

I asked him to leave.

 

I know you’ll slip up.

 

I slip up.

 

But I’m changing.  I’ve changed.

 

So if you think you know me,

stop.

He tried to stay, said he was close to all my friends,

that they wouldn’t like me if not for him.

I handed him his bag and his wallet.

 

I am still loving, still kind, still

into every handcraft on the planet

still obsessed with Natalie MacMaster

still tactile, still kinethetic,

still increasingly seduced by water.

 

I am still opinionated, too,

still fiery, still intense, still a total wiseass,

still an athlete, still fierce, still proud…

but that might be news to you.

 

He was kind of jealous, wanted

me to stay indoors and 

weep into my pillow.

He told me I had nothing to offer.

He told me a lot of things.

 

I got out the duct tape.

 

I’m planning to surprise you,

me,

everyone.

 

With who I really am.

 

The depression covered me up.

I’m stepping out, now.

 

Every day is a revelation.

He stopped talking.

And I would love to have you come with me.

He was only quiet for a minute.

But first, stop expecting depression.

I opened the door.

Expect, instead,

laughter,

joy,

intense interest,

a desire to learn to surf.

I called my old friends.  They were glad to hear

that we weren’t hanging out much anymore.

They wanted to have dinner.

Expect, instead,

bursting into song,

easy touches,

hard kisses,

dance.

They suggested I learn to sing, swing, speak Portuguese.

They suggested I change the locks.

Expect, instead,

impatience at being expected to hold still.

I took his key.

Expect, instead,

the spark of life.

I watched him pull away, still talking.

Expect, instead,

anything

and everything.

 

But don’t expect depression.

He isn’t welcome here anymore.

intensity and…pleasure

Intensive: pleasure

So as an intensive, I’ve had an interesting relationship with pleasure.

Maybe I should start here: a few weeks ago I was sitting in a friend’s living room.  We were discussing tantra and energy and this thing called a kundalini awakening, which is basically a way of talking about what happens when you really for real unlock the incredible energetic power in your own body.

It can blow the top of your head off, metaphorically speaking.  In fact, some stories exist about people doing it before they were ready and disrupting their psychological equilibrium quite a bit.

For better or for worse, my experience has been different from that of everyone else I was talking to.  I’ve known that energy intimately from a very young age, and so I’ve had a much more gentle coming-to-terms-with-it.  It’s more like a steady, hot fire.

Pleasure was always hooked to it, but in a really broad way. On the other hand, sexual pleasure was a bit of a puzzle. 

I was aware of sexual pleasure from an even younger age than when I first connected with that energy.  I started masturbating very early in life.  But orgasm, for decades, eluded me.

It wasn’t that I didn’t want it.

It was just that I had no idea how to get there.

I was eventually very lucky to get exactly the help I needed with that puzzle.  But somewhere along the line, running on a parallel but separate track, I was doing a similar thing with other kinds of pleasure: I was sidestepping them at the last minute.

I was afraid to be loud.  I was afraid to be seen.  I was afraid to be foolish in public.  I was afraid of showing UP.  I had my reasons.  Visibility had turned out to be really dangerous for me for a long time. 

But how it happened matters less than what happens now, which is this: I’m taking the cork out of this carbonated bottle of awesome, because there is NO REASON to cap my pleasure off.  No reason to mute my laughter.  No reason to not be utterly, completely, gleefully delighted. 

This is what intensives DO.  We dive in and love the hell out of whatever we’re loving, for real, completely, totally, thoroughly, and quite possibly with sound effects.

Why be shy about delight?
Why hide that you love something, or someone, THIS MUCH?

Haters maybe gotta hate, I don’t know about that.

But lovers gotta love, and that’s where I’m setting up camp.

LOVE ON!

stay here

I was meditating this morning. Last night I watched the chakra scene from Avatar: The Last Airbender. I’m sure that helped inspire this.

There is no point in struggling for nonattachment. That is an attachment in itself. When nonattachment comes, it will be time to leave the earthly plane. Until then, attachment is what keeps us here. You have work to do.

There are some things you can let go of: anger, guilt, shame, fear, lies. But complete unattachment is separation from the physical body that brought you here. Do not rush toward it. It is in the process of becoming enlightened that you can serve the world. 

on mats and cats

This could be about my cat.

 

He’s beautiful and sweet, 25 lbs, laid back, totally the opposite of his brother.

 

He has long hair and a slightly flattened face–seems like he’s probably half Persian, but you know how shelter cats are.  He likes pets, sleeping on the bed, and pets.

 

For the longest time he was just fine, grooming wise.  I’d brush him when I wanted to and not when I didn’t.  But this year, something changed.  He’s getting older, he gained some extra weight, I moved the litterbox to the porch which is unheated, who knows.  But I went away for a few days and one little clump of mats had become mats EVERYWHERE except his back.  Everywhere.  Belly was a giant tangle.  Back end totally locked up.  Now I used to have long hair.  I know what big snarls feel like.  I couldn’t even imagine how uncomfortable he must have been. And he wouldn’t let me touch them because they probably hurt like crazy.

 

Finally, two days ago, I put my foot down.  He kept coming to curl up with me, and I started work on his belly.  After about half his belly was clear, he started to get that I was helping and stopped nipping at me.  I got his belly, mostly, and half his hindquarters before he was way too sore to continue.

 

I figured I’d wait a couple of days and finish.

 

But today, he’s working on it himself.  He’s pulling and fussing with the mats that are left.

 

He needed a window.  He needed an opening.  He needed a way to get started.  I’m not abandoning him to his efforts, but I think things will move much better with both of us working on it.

 

He needed to know he could feel better so he could feel like the effort was worth it.  He already hurts less, just halfway there, and he’s more nimble.

 

Maybe I’m projecting.

 

But maybe not.

seeking impermanence

The thing about impermanence is that it cuts both ways
The plant in the cup dies
The wild things die
Our pets die
So do we.

On the other hand this
Too
Shall pass:
Illness, grey days, the seeming
Endlessness of winter.
Mostly.

For a select few
The illness passes only into death,
The injustice lives on,
the grey stretches out forever.

We would like to think that few is a few,
A handful,
Three, maybe four souls per
…state? Province?
Continent?
Generation?

We know we are wrong.

A few is a fallacy,
Naïve gentling of the ranks that fall into line under
The classified ad:
Seeking Impermanence
For lifelong relationship

I am lying here, grateful,
Joints, nerves, muscles, bones,
Hyperpresent,
Pressing like clockwork with every beat of my heart,
Secure in the fairy tale
That this will not last forever.

Not two hours south is a new mother whose freak accident has left her paralyzed from the neck down.

I cannot possibly imagine.

She is determined to walk again.

I know
I will cook,
I will drive,
I will go to the ball,
Cinders.

I will walk away from this one.

Grateful
and aware
and grateful.

when family comes to work

One of the things about being a minister, or working in any kind of volunteer organization, is that you start to see really clearly how the lines between work and home get blurred. Volunteers, after all, are not in work mode–they are on their own time, doing something for fun or to contribute because they feel it is important.

When people come in feeling like they’re not working, however, it means they often bring fewer boundaries and less formality with them. Sometimes, that’s awesome. It allows a kind of bonding and camraderie that is rarely possible in the workplace. Sometimes, though, it means that people behave badly–in ways they would never consider appropriate if they were at work.

We’ve almost all done it. And when that happens, it’s often because something about the situation is reminding us of something from our past, from home, from an old family pattern. We might not even be aware of it. In fact, usually we’re not. We respond from a sense of threat and from the gut, with only a vague awareness that it feels icky before we act.

And usually that action only makes it worse, because we’re reproducing a pattern from home, one that was strong enough to get echoed forward in time.

You’d think this would be less true in the workplace, where you try to be on your best behavior. But what I’m seeing, especially as a coach, is that family systems and patterns get played out just as often in formal work environments, although the way they play out might be a little different.

That’s the bad news. The good news is, if you know about it you can fix it.

Once you start trying to notice it, you might see it in a physical reaction–a tension in your belly or the way your shoulders creep up to hug your ears. Or you might just realize that whatever you’re feeling is out of proportion with the experience you’re having.

Then you have a few choices.

You can change the physical first. Turns out that forcing yourself to smile can improve your mood. So can standing straight, shoulders back, feet firmly planted. Or raising your arms in the victory pose. Amy Cuddy has a great TED talk about that.

If that’s not working or not your style, you can go for the emotional, remind yourself that this situation is different, that you’re safe, and talk yourself down.

Or you can take a timeout. The inital biochemical wave of panic lasts about 90 seconds, whether it’s from your boss asking to speak with you later or a tiger chasing you across the savannah. In that moment you lose higher order thinking, creativity, and your sense of humor, among other things. After that, if the threat has passed, you can either retrigger the chemical cascade by telling yourself the situation is terrible, or you can take a deep breath, relax, or even meditate to calm down. That will give you the rest of your brain back.

Sounds simple enough, right?

Now the tricky part is that for most of us it’s nearly impossible to see the family connection from inside the situation. We’re just too close–and too triggered. And that’s where it’s good to get help.

There are tons of resources out there, too. Plenty of books and articles, if those help. But often you need a person with some perspective–a friend, a coach, or a therapist. There’s no shame in getting help.

That bears repeating: there is NO shame in getting help, and I don’t just say that because I’m a coach. We need help. As humans we’re made to live and connect and grow in community. And as we’ve slowly moved from villages and extended families to isolation and hyper-self-sufficiency, we’ve lost the incredible gift of outside eyes.

We’ve lost it because we are somehow ashamed to be anything less that perfect. But we need to see ourselves and each other as three dimensional, capable of beauty and grace and redemption without perfection. And in the cases where friends are not available for that, we can, with total grace and confidence, pay for help.

And that’s where true strength lies: not in success when everything is going right; not in toughing it out and pretending we’re fine when we’re hurting, but in knowing when we need help and having the self-confidence to ask for it.

Getting support is what makes us truly robust, truly reliable. And when you can see what’s going on, you can find a way to make it better, which makes life better for everyone. Most important, though, it frees you up to really be present in the world, to give and share what you have to give and share, so the world can benefit from your brilliance.

And that’s truly a gift. For all of us.

Navigating the Pain

I’ve been thinking about how pleasure meets intense pain. Here’s what today looked like.

Want to hear me read this?

It’s here.

So I’m lying here on my back, trying to navigate the incessant pain, the kind that presses and burns and shoots from one place to another. It doesn’t stay still, but there doesn’t seem to be a pattern to where it goes next. And through this all I’m aware that the only way that I’m going to manage it at all is by following what little wisps of pleasure are left in its wake. This means finding them first, the echoes of the absence of pain. And so I breathe in and breathe out and let the tension in my adductors go, willing my leg to relax, and I find an opening. But instead of immersing myself in that opening I put one foot there and try to make another opening. I will my quads to relax, I breathe into them. The pain is in the middle so I start instead at the knee. I breathe an opening into the muscle tissues, I breathe an opening up from the knee toward my hip and somewhere, for a moment, there’s a space. If I don’t think too hard, now I have two spaces, one on the inside of my thigh, and one on the top. I breathe into them both. With them both released, I feel the tugging in my groin, no longer balanced by the tension in my leg. Holding both openings with one piece of my mind, I press my thought into my groin and will that, too, to release. At this point it feels like a juggling exercise, trying to keep all of the openings open, and breathing, and allow the pain to fall away, that pain to which I’ve become so accustomed that it is almost like breathing itself. And with all of those held open, as I breathe and relax and breathe, the pain shifts to my hip and is more piercing and more solid there. I wonder briefly if I should take what I’ve got, or if I should continue pursuing the openings of pleasure. Some part of me wonders if I’m getting greedy. Another realizes that pain free is not unreasonable but I simply am not sure I can do it. These are the uncertainties that pain plants when I’m not paying attention. And so, holding my focus, I allow a small thread to lean and weave into my hip to create a crack in the ball of tension there, to open it up. I feel the pain try to return to my thighs as I do this, but I cannot panic now, so I breathe again and open the thigh again and then for a moment all is silent. The pleasure, for the moment, has won.

on becoming a mage

Nobody ever tells you
Hey, wake up wake up, this
Is the day you become a mage!
The magician school comes for you at noon!
It’s not like Harry Potter
No Hagrid no professors who turn into cats,
no owls…
…well, not many
And they don’t carry mail.
Just messages that turn your head at dusk
The vague shadow of another world
Beckoning in the side mirror but
It Reflects nothing
Which is itself a message
So you start hunting in the corners
Lighting candles
and leaving the lights off
Bathing in herbs that begged to be picked last summer and you didn’t know why
One day you find your voice,
Over dishes perhaps,
Or halfway from here to there
With advertisements for wrinkle cream blurring the lines of reality as you navigate traffic
The words pour forth
Or the paint,
Whatever,
And suddenly there you are
Casting spells on I-95
or handing a small packet to your darling but perennially sad co-worker with one word
Drink.
It makes you feel a little like Alice (in wonderland) or
maybe the puppeteer behind wonderland,
did you ever wonder who put all those chess pieces there, anyway?
And now you’re doing it
Contributing to the mystery and absurdity of the world as you go around behind the powers that have been ceded to,
Trying to make magic that will balance the forces of light and darkness.
You find you have no illusions, there is an unseelie court
but fortunately they believe they are doing the right thing, too,
And are easily swayed by cookies
Although they work better if you sing over them while baking,
Calling sunbeams and flecks of hope to sprinkle on top.
And there comes a day finally when you realize
You have only sweatpants, witches clothes, and disguises,
And you don’t want anything else
That you come and go as you please
And that you have developed the habit of making magic everywhere.
You are a little eccentric and the constant
Use of power has rendered your hair untameable And probably grey
But you are indifferent because it suits you perfectly It makes you glow
And at long last you know you are using your power
For good.

It Will Change You

What people don’t tell you about healing from trauma would fill a book, an encyclopedia, all the leaves of all the trees of Sherwood Forest, all the grains of sand in the Caribbean.

What people don’t tell you could scare you off from ever doing the work or it could make it seem like it might actually work.

Finally.

What people don’t tell you

is that it will change you.

It will hurt sometimes, sometimes more than the trauma itself did,

the best metaphor is that you are breaking up scar tissue, rubbing and pressing and forcing and scrubbing your way through the very things that have held you together.

You will find a capacity to handle pain that you didn’t know you had.

Even if you knew you were really good at pain.

But this time you will be present with it, staring it down, dancing Kali’s dance of destruction and rebirth, standing on the hot coals until you can feel your feet beginning to burn.

And you will know this is the only way through and you will learn to say stop, that’s enough, that’s too much and you will learn when to say, okay, it hurts but okay, I’m going to be okay, let’s keep going, it’s going to be okay, breathing like lamaze class, like you’re birthing something much too big, which is, in fact true, because you are birthing the grown version of you and no one should ever have to birth themselves, but this time you will, and you do.

And sometimes it will be too easy.

Sometimes you will wake up and the thing you have been pushing against since you were twenty five or seventeen or twelve or three will just be gone, gone like it never existed, barely a ghost remaining to show you where it was, or not even a ghost and you will wonder if you dreamed it or made it up (no, you didn’t) and suddenly you will be tumbling full force into the void beyond the resistance, like you just ran off the edge of a cliff.

And you will feel betrayed by the very thing you were fighting against for so long, because at least you could count on it.  It always kept you from falling. And it didn’t stop you from falling, this time.

And you will take a deep breath and dive back into the work because you want to know, you need to know, what do you stand on now?

It will ask you who are you without the trauma? And you will look, incredulous, and blink, as if they have just asked what happens when OPEC starts agitating for alternative fuel conversions and funding wind farms in small countries, and try for the first (and second and twenty second) time to imagine what in the world without the trauma even means.

And eventually you will imagine it, and that will be even more scary.

And then it will feel like a breath of fresh air, just about the time you discover that there’s a whole extra closet full of skeletons you didn’t know you were going to have to clean out.

It will change your body, it will make you gain and lose weight, turning that whole chrysalis-butterfly metaphor into reality as you wrap yourself up and peel the layers off, over and over again.  Things you thought you liked to do will disappear and things you thought impossible will suddenly become your favorite way to wake yourself up too early.  If you have always had a fear of swimming you will decide that open water distance freestyle at 5 AM is the only thing that makes you feel better.  If you hate to exercise you will start, and if you live to run marathons you will become a couch potato.  Or not.

Because there are definitely no rules for this.  Everyone does it differently, everyone is different, and you will be different from moment to moment and day to day.  Just as you get yourself figured out again you’ll go talk to your therapist or your best friend or your dog or the tallest trees in the woods near your house and something else will crack open and spill egg and ice cream all over the sidewalk where it will melt in place and you will not know what to do with yourself.  Again.

Your music will change, your hair will change, if it was straight it will become curly, or curly will become straight.  Your body chemistry, so exquisitely adjusted to constant adrenaline floods and cortisol overflows, will change radically.  Your hormones, your sex drive, your physical sensations will change.

Your ability to think will change.  If you have been concrete-linear, prepare to find your feelings more compelling than you ever thought they would be.  If you have been a giant ball of emotion you might just discover that you have a little logic hiding in there somewhere.

Half the stuff you thought was you will turn out to be how you protected yourself and like a marionette whose strings have been cut, you will spend some time very, very limp, in a puddle, on the floor, while you figure out what happens when you don’t have to protect yourself from yourself or from anyone else anymore, not like that.

You will see other people differently.  You will see triggers as triggers.  You will develop a self-protectiveness and a compassion that looks and feels totally different from before.  You will gently tell people that you can see that they are hurting and then you will not do anything about it, because you will know that no one could fix yours and no one can fix theirs, either.  Ironically, you will be more willing to trust that people love you.

You will become a better judge of people.

You will judge people less.

You will see your flaws more clearly, but they will feel like less of a disaster.  In fact, you might even begin to think your flaws are kind of cute.  This makes other people’s flaws infinitely easier to embrace, which makes the world suddenly much more full of beautiful, interesting people who were certainly not there last year.   Where did they all come from, anyway?

And all this means that the years of self-love work you have already done will kick into Advanced mode, that things you did by rote and discipline will become easier, but not before they kick your ass one more time for good measure.  All the wrestling begins to feel like horseplay with a fallen angel who is an old friend instead of a life-threatening crisis.

Because it has changed you.  You are changed.  You are different.

And one day you realize how much of this you’ve done, and how much it made possible, and you sit down and cry, great gulping tears of gratitude and grief and more gratitude for all the beauty and all the stuff that is, praise be, finally DONE, so done it is solid enough to stand on.  And you find your feet hold you up after all.  And you know you have more to walk.  And that, at long last, is going to be okay, probably mostly almost certainly.

 

This is How I Pray

When I pray this is how I pray

Hands clasped before me on my pillow

Curled on my side

Before the day has breached the raw and sleepy ramparts

Here where the call to prayer is too loud to be overrun by lists or fears

Of not enough, not good enough,

Of being devoted to a thing that does not exist

Hope or something

And might not care

Love or something

And might not be able to change my world

Without my unlikely and awkward assistance

Because I have hands and it does not.

Before any of that can creep in

While my brain is still soft and muzzy

I pray without thinking just pray without asking

How

I pray with the quiet wings of birds and angels

That I, too,

Might fly.

your body knows. Listen.