you are not alone
In studying existential psychotherapy, one of the concepts we discussed in class was the notion of existential isolation. The idea that, on the whole, each of us is alone with our experience, and must take responsibility for ourselves. One of my classmates pointed out to a potential conflict; that is, existential psychotherapists are supposed to hold their clients with therapeutic love, but how can therapists impart love and awaken our essential isolation at the same time?
Lately I've been getting these internal nudges that it's time for me to speak. I prefer to avoid speaking up until I have formulated my thought clearly, because otherwise I tend to ramble all over the place and cover bizarre points that seem unrelated and stop sentences about five to ten words after I really should have. But these nudges to speak feel strong, like something rustling in the belly that says, "Trust me, I've got this, just raise your hand."
This time, what I said was that this therapeutic love was the perfect vehicle for teaching us about our isolation. Here is a person whose job it is to simply love you, listen to you, and help you become your most authentic, whole, and healthy self. And here I am, the client, avoiding eye contact, lying to myself, caught up in denials and rationalizations, wanting to be anywhere but where I am in the moment. It's our complexes and choices that keep us isolated.
The Quran asks "So which of the favors of the Lord would you deny?" I've heard this quoted in various contexts, and now having looked at the chapter entire, I find the saying more complex than I could claim to understand with authority. My sense is that it is a call to gratitude and service. Of all the good things, all the love and blessings manifest on this earth, which of these am I denying even now? How would I rather be caught up in my own self-justifications and feeling wronged, and keeping these feelings to myself where they could not be aired out and resolved? And if I accept with gratitude all the blessings of my life, how could I refuse the favors asked of me? How could I admire a perfect sunset and leave beer cans strewn on the ground? How can I be loved for all my faults and begrudge others for having theirs?
In this hyper-individualistic culture, I think there is deep ambivalence about this kind of love. We devote so much of our popular art and energy toward imagining such a love, and so much personal energy toward making sure it does not enter our lives. That dance of gratitude and service pulls us outside of the ego's boundaries and into a relational framework in which it is no longer possible to pretend we are alone and what we do does not matter. This may be the ultimate path to healing the deep self-loathing that so many of us carry, but our demons are tenacious, cantankerous, and will not be expelled. At times I find myself honestly convinced that I would be better off bitterly resenting a person I care about than I would taking the risk to admit that they hurt me. To admit that I am not alone, bounded, invincible; but am already, vulnerably, connected.
The title of this entry is meant to evoke the Michael Jackson song (written by R. Kelly!), which has been with me lately, but I'm not particularly fond of the video. Perhaps just listen to the song in the background.
Anxiety and Silence
I used to long for a vacation from myself. The idea meant different things at different times, but most often it was a reaction to feeling feeling exhausted by an ongoing inner monologue, a constant analysis of myself and my situations, and seeming inability to feel my feelings in the moment. The solution, I thought, was to turn off my mind, disconnect the internal censor, and cease the endless feeling of "shoulds" that caused ongoing stress. This shaped my early sense of what it meant to be liberated.
It took time to recognize this as anxiety. I knew I worried a lot, and ruminated over things for hours at a time, unable to let go. When I feared someone was upset with me, I would not ask directly but analyze the situation to death and ask others what they thought and try to come up with a plan to make it so the person couldn't be upset with me. You know, if it turned out they were.
Most distressing was my inability to simply enjoy things. I would sit at concerts, or with friends, or go to parties and get frustrated that my anxious commentary wouldn't let me be immersed in the moments. My attempts to relax seemed to pull me only more deeply into the cycles, adding judgment and arguing to the anxious thought loops. The mind could not escape its own maze. When I became more attuned to my body, I thought dancing, drinking, or sex were paths to that silence. But when I did manage to disconnect, the result was automatic behavior that was equally without pleasure. Eating half the pizza without noticing or savoring. Drinking to excess and then being too drunk to enjoy much of anything, only to spend the next day analyzing everything I said and did to make sure I hadn't any regrets.
Since beginning regular meditation and devoting myself to my spiritual practice, I've found myself plunged more deeply into anxiety. Early in my sitting practice, I had a morning in which I was startled to realize I could actually feel the tension in my leg muscles. The revelation was not only that I could have that degree of bodily awareness, but in doing so, I could allow the muscles to relax. So it was with other aspects of anxiety: I became more connected, more conscientious of cyclical thought loops that had no resolution, stressing about things beyond control, avoiding others because of my fears of their opinion of me. As with the muscular contraction, awareness brought with it the potential to ease and relax these constrictions. It has and continues to take practice, and there times when I have to make peace with the understanding that some part of me will continue to ruminate in spite of my efforts. I embraced self-observation and relaxation practices as means to understand and alleviate my anxiety. I've also engaged in psychotherapy and pharmacotherapy at various points.
In the past month, I've returned to that early longing to disconnect and now see it as a craving for the silence within, and had the sense that it could be within reach after these years of work. Though not a permanent silence. In fact, I'm no longer wholly sure what I imagine it to be like, to experience such stillness. Turning off my mind is not an ideal solution; it does not lead to greater consciousness, peace, or integrity. Neither does being wholly consumed in my mind. In the Haindl tarot deck, the Wheel of Fortune card shows the wheel spinning all manner of drama around a wounded center, while beneath, in starry bliss, the human face gazes. This is not detachment out of fear, but true nonattachment that comes through being in the world and yet able to observe with equanimity, acceptance.
I've increased my meditation practice for a time to help cultivate that inner silence, and still find there are times when I've spent twenty minutes thinking of television shows, perceived slights, gossip, or other distractions and forgetting to notice the feeling of air moving in and out of my nose, and sinking into that stillness within. This past weekend, however, I was out socially and kept noticing my anxiety come up about being in social situations, or wanting to worry about school situations I cannot control, and found that I could breathe into the stillness within me and allow those things to be as they are. Not silencing those thoughts and feelings, but meeting them with silence, a silence somehow whole and organic that allows a deeper coherence to emerge, a voice within that was ready to be heard and to speak.
I went out dancing last night and noticed again how my mind felt like a degree of separation from the joy of experience. It occurred to me that this space between my mind and my experience may not be a curse. This could be an opening wherein consciousness can hold space. Meeting my mind and experience with silence and acceptance gave birth to ecstatic dancing and joy.
The Tower
We didn't notice it. We spent hours contemplating, ruminating, worrying, arguing, going over the plans back and forth, up and down. We had consultations, supervision, feedback. We read books, we did exercises. We wrote reams of pages on everything that might have gone wrong and how to make it right.
When it hit, we didn't see it coming. The one thing no one contemplated, or contemplated seriously anyway. A passing thought. A glance up, a flicker of an intimation: that seems off somehow.
Our precious self-concept. Our beautiful agenda. Our magnum opus. Our utopian dream. Our religious vision. All dashed to dust from a moment's carelessness, a glance in the wrong direction. How can something take so much effort to build and so little to destroy?
Yet the cracks had been accumulating. Nothing happens in an instant but the impact and the fall. Nothing occurs in a vacuum. Nothing is separate. That is the lie that caused us to build. If only we can get higher from this ball of dirt and filth, if only we could touch the firmament! Then we would free ourselves of this vale of incoherence, death, and meaninglessness.
The ball of fire is the apple of chaos thrown into the party. Discordia revenging her snub. The thirteenth witch offering her unwanted blessing. And after all this, after all the heart and passion poured out, all that's left is to watch the edifice collapse upon itself.
Now we return to the dirt. Some of us are screaming and crying. Some are blaming each other, or the gods. Some choose to ignore what is happening. Some pretend we will begin again and make something better. More clinging and delusions.
We cannot rush to the next project. The collapse must be mourned. We will never learn if we simply walk away now. We may take the time to clear away, to salvage what can be saved, to dispose what must.
Having lost the center of our activity, the sterling epicenter of our idealism, we now have Geb, the open fields supporting us, and Nut, the starry sky stretching above. We have possibility, terrifying and free.
The Lord of Karma
Now is the time of what is known as my Saturn return, in which the planet Saturn arrives at the location it was in during the time of my birth. In some views, it has been occurring for the past few years, since Saturn arrived in the sign of Libra. In another, it happens officially on Tuesday, when the positioning is exact.
One title of Saturn is the Lord of Karma, and according to many, the time of return causes one to confront the essence of whom they truly are and how their lives align, or fail to align, with that essence. If someone finds they are not living an authentic life, many tumultuous changes can occur during and after the Saturn return.
Theodicy
A while back, I got into an argument with a Christian about meditation and whether one could claim to be able to connect directly with God. Of course, the first problem is that we were having an argument about "God" in which both of us likely meant very different things, although generally we both wanted to hit the target of "whatever divine force or Being that is greater us and has something to do with our reason for existence." In his opinion, it was arrogant of me to assume I could ever be capable of connecting with this Being by myself. To him, God was something unknowable and beyond us, not present in our day to day world. My idea of God is panenetheistic, included in all things and containing all things, though we humans need our spiritual practices in order to be consciously aware of this on a consistent basis.
What struck me most about the conversation was him talking about his dying grandmother. He asked me, if I were there with her, would I think God was there? Would I sit and meditate and try to connect with God? To which I responded, Yes, God would be there, but I would not be sitting in removed meditation. More likely I would want to be present with the dying person, because God is in them as well. In a Neopagan worldview, the cycles of living and dying are sacred, part and parcel of our existence in this cyclical world. Dying is not an evil thing to be avoided at all costs. But for this person, not necessarily all Christians but this person in particular, it seemed that he could not accept that God could be in any way connected to his dying grandmother.
In retrospect, this attitude bothered me most. It arises from a theology that attempts to bolster this idea that God is a discrete entity that is all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving, yet lives somewhere off in the sky. A belief in such a deity might lead to profoundly moving and sustaining religiosity. Jesus himself was purported to have come from heaven to endure the worst this world had to offer. If the Christian God was so willing to do that, out of love for his people, then why wouldn't he be present for one dying person?
Yet if the religious person is unwilling to include death, evil, or any of the miseries of our world into his or her worldview, I cannot see how this could be a sustaining or nourishing spirituality when the hard times come. It's a question I continue to unpack and revisit throughout my life---what is the nature of the gods, and why is there suffering in the world? Myths of creation offer intriguing ideas as to the nature of suffering and its origin in the human psyche, but pain and death predate human existence. There have been many casualties in the project of living, from failed evolutionary missteps to creatures feeding upon each other for survival.
I suppose my answers these days are largely Existential. Suffering exists because that's the nature of life. Yet I find that beauty exists as well, and love, and softness, and joy, and the possibility of something greater. I've found that times of personal suffering have yielded profound shifts in my self-awareness that have led me to become generally happier and more whole than I was before. I also find that some wounds continue to ache years after I think they're healed.
I don't think of God as a discrete entity that is mapping out existence like a game of chess. I think of God as every thing that has been, is, and will be, working together as one interconnected ecosystem. Yet I also think of the intelligence that arises from all its parts. When I say "God," I mean the name for Everything, and I believe everything is included in her. The mystery of dying, the grief of surviving, all of that has worth and importance, and all of it can be sacred in some way. We have to claim our own capacity to make meaning, as our divine birthright.
You Must Change Your Life
Archaic Torso of Apollo
We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,
gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.
Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:
would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.
-Rainier Maria Rilke
In Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler's protagonist teachers her followers that "God is change." In this view, God as Everything is in process, nothing is fixed except the fact of fluidity. Living in the material cosmos, all that exists is ever-changing. Our human psyches develop myriad ways to convince ourselves that either this isn't true, or that somehow we can escape this reality. Finding perfect love. Writing a work of art that will last beyond our deaths. Adhering to some rigid moral code or practice in the hopes of achieving an eternal, fixed existence beyond death. As a pagan, I am not sure I believe in any kind of heavenly existence that exists beyond the natural cycles of life and death. Yet I do think that I have a soul that is more than the physical body, that may survive the death of this life and move on to another. There may well be a realm outside of the cycles of life and death, or a dimension of existence that includes all these things and thereby transcends it, but it does not feel useful to me while I'm figuring out how to manage the changes of this life.
The torso of Apollo, Greek god of music, medicine, poetry, plague, and light, animates the poem above. Time has dismembered the sculpture, as in a way it had dismembered the ancient religion celebrated by the sculpture. Yet the passion and fervor with which the artist created the icon still suffuses the curves of the sculpture's body. The power of the god beams out like light through the power of its curves, a facet of sun embodied, stretched further by the power of poetry. Here the power of the sun elicits further change for you, the viewer-reader, by virtue of being seen. Being seen, completely and totally, necessitates change.
The work of psychology and many great spiritual traditions requires the participant to develop the capacity to see. To see themselves more clearly, and thereby to see the world without the blinders of personality and history. We go through every day of our lives doing some behavior that makes us unhappy, never quite understanding why, until the day comes when a sharp insight into our own nature penetrates so deeply that there is no way we can act as we have, though we may not yet have the will to become who we wish to be.
Such change is not easy. It's not the inevitable, passive, entropic change, or even the explosive change of volcanoes. Any change inspired by such seeing, by the light of Apollo, is best bent toward the conscious becoming of one's brightest self. In this process, it may be we can tap into some eternal quality, that light that radiates from the torso of Apollo in spite of age, damage, and the loss of history.
Review of The Enneagram of Passions and Virtues
The Enneagram of Passions and Virtues: Finding the Way Home by Sandra Maitri
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Having recently taken a class on psychology and spirituality, in which the Enneagram was featured prominently, I was excited by the content and approach Maitri took in revealing the spiritual and psychological potential of working with the Enneagram. Initially, I treated this book as I have any other Enneagram book, simply reading the introductory material and then skipping directly to my type.
Turns out, this is not a typical introductory Enneagram book. Instead of each chapter being a repetitive profile of the individual personality types, Maitri uses the "passions" and "virtues" associated with each type as a way of exploring the spiritual growth of every type. "Passion" here alludes more to the Greek connotation, in terms of an uncontrollable, maladaptive fixation on one way of being. Those familiar with the seven deadly sins will recognize the qualities associated with each type: lust for Eight, avarice for Five, envy for Four, and so forth. Reading only about one's particular passion associated with type, however, will miss the wealth of insight available in the book. Every human is possessed of every passion in some capacity or another, as Maitri reveals with acuity.
The passions themselves are not simply bad habits or negative traits, but patterns of being that keep us locked in our unhealthy patterns and attachments, impeding spiritual and personal growth. Maitri pairs this spiritual insight with an intriguing use of psychoanalytic theory to discuss how the personality becomes locked into place, and how Westerners may use our personalities as a pathway toward spiritual growth. Instead of trying to transcend our habitual thoughts and feelings, our typological fixations, the power of the Enneagram is to bring us more fully into those passions. By inhabiting these passions and finding the emptiness at the core, we can progress toward realization of the virtues.
Mysteries of Sex
Help me to see the woman,
As in a sense Your incarnation,
And to see in myself the image
Of the bright God, Your Son and Lover,
To accept from wife or harlot the chalice,
Taking as from Your own hands the cup,
And to abstain without scorn.
- From "Prayer for sexual purification," by Victor Anderson
Sex is one of the most powerful mysteries I have encountered so far. Not a day goes by that I don't think about it in some way, since at least the upswelling of testosterone during puberty. I've been terrified of it and wishing I could abandon my self within it. I've had times in my life when I sexually indulged in behavior that I later regretted. Some years ago, I was lonely. I craved friendship, intimacy, connection with others, but I was encased within my conditioned fears of the vulnerability required of such daring. Instead I pursued empty sexual encounters. So much time and energy was spent seeking partners, yet the actual relationship---for they are all relationships, even if they last minutes---lasted only a fraction of that time. My craving for connection was only momentarily satisfied, but I had no idea what I really wanted. At times I put myself in unnecessary risk, or ended up feeling I didn't respect myself, or simply wasted too much of my time with too little reward.
I also went through periods of avowed celibacy, reorienting my relationship to my sexuality. I have been liberal and conservative, shy and experimental, shut-down and broken open. I have come to believe the sexual energy we exchange is the creative power that generates universes, children, novels, and new scientific insight. Sharing sexual energy with another person means opening myself up to transformation.
There is so much still in our cultural shadows about sex. Many folks end up relegating sexual desire to the dark corners of the soul, where it lives with the other monsters and things to fear and hate. Having sexual desire is so fraught with taboos and restrictions that I think a lot of people I've known end up drunk or high just to quiet the inner censor long enough to satisfy their urges. All kinds of drama awaits that route: this one is too drunk to enjoy the encounter, or remember it in the morning. Someone crosses a boundary they didn't know about, or weren't able to hear. People who may actually want to date each other end up just screwing and then avoiding each other because they weren't attending to their hearts. Or the sex leads to asymmetry, when Person A wants more than Person B.
I think some desires feel so dark that it can feel safer to be drunk, high, or in an anonymous encounter, all to avoid accountability. Whatever happens is safely contained, and we can wake up in the morning and distance ourselves from the experience. I think the avoidance of accountability warps the soul over time, but more practically, it opens us up to all kinds of danger of abuse, infection, assault, theft, etc.
These days, I'm not sure if I believe in anything called casual sex. Sex has never been casual for me, though there were times I tried to convince myself otherwise. Sex doesn't have to lead to marriage or big, deep, important relationships. Sex can be an exciting, rewarding exchange between two or more people who know each other for maybe half a day. Sex can be hurtful and exciting. Sex can heal a rift between long-term lovers, and sex can create the rift.
My beliefs: a sexual ethics that begins with valuing myself and valuing my partner. Sex is a powerful, divine, creative gift that is mine to share or not. I am responsible for my sexual fulfillment, not my spouse, or boyfriend, or trick. In sharing sex, I honor myself and my partner. In declining to share sex, I wish to "abstain without scorn:" accepting as given that there is no obligation to have sex with anyone, and everyone is sovereign over their own bodies. Someone else's desire is not a curse or a duty to fulfill. My desire is not a curse or a duty to fulifill. Saying "no" does not have to be a judgment, it can be simply setting a clear boundary. What I want is conscious relationship.
Relationship doesn't liberate sex of problems, but it allows the fullest transformative power of sex to emerge. If something goes awry, we don't have to be left alone to dwell on it or try to pretend it's not happening. If we can fuck each other, with all of our darkness and our light, we can respect ourselves and respect each other and still go to whatever exciting, nasty places await. We can be with each other in the process of becoming whole.
ETA: Read From "just sex" to "Just Sex" for an excellent articulation of this.