Category Archives: fear and anxiety

Why is “normal” actually “harmful”?

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We can be like Cinderella’s step sisters or like a middle weight boxer trying to “fit in” to the category we wish to enter. We think, “I want to be a princess so I will cram my foot into these shoes.” We think, ” I must shed weight no matter what the physical cost to be able to compete.”

Social Signalling is out of our control. Our neurons are set up to synk with the behavior of people we observe around us. It is a left over survival pattern. Back in time, we observed others and if Kruk did not follow the ways of those around him and just decided the red berries looked delicious, he would end up curled on the ground poisoned dead. It was a matter of the discontinuance of Kruk and of his DNA.

In the world entranced by the manichaen doctrine the soul of a wicked one was like someone carrying the plague. Wiki tells us Manichaeism taught that life in this world is unbearably painful and radically evil. In Manichaeism inner illumination reveals that the soul, which shares in the nature of God, has fallen into the evil world of matter and must be saved by the means of spirit or intelligence. Consequently, in a society where survival depended on being connected to a village, shunning and exile were used as a passive death sentence.

No food would be given, no shelter, no warmth either physical or emotional. If a member of a social group broke the law of the normal, they were possessed by the devil and were left to die.

Even more contemporarily, various groups use exclusion as a way of controlling desired behavior.

The result is that we have in our DNA the memory of complying with what is considered normal. It is one of the reasons that social signalling controls our choices.

And so we, when trapped in a crowded theatre and fire breaks out, follow the crowd even if it leads to death. And so when we have evidence that certain behaviors shorten our lives and sabotage our health, it is worth it for us. At least we are not alone.

The only way we can pull ourselves out of this hypnotic state of automatically following the mores and choices of members of our social group is to become “the watcher.” We can teach ourselves to sit back as if we are in a drawing class and really concentrate on what we are seeing. We see the lines, the shapes, the patterns, the presentation of behaviors. We take time to consider each action.

The questions to ask ourselves are: “Does this serve the greater good? Does this action, this decision make me healthier, stronger, a better version of myself?”

It is like the mindfulness walk of a Buddhist sanga. Step, step, stop. And as one foot touches another the mind connects to the ground. The mind focuses in on the now. The mind can ask, “Where are you going?” “Are you in balance?”

who could you be?

We are in a time when “normal” no longer is of service to our own lives; to the culture surrounding us; to the earth.

It is time to see who you were meant to be. It is time to grow into a deeply connected self. But not connected to others mindlessly following. We start to wonder who we could be…. if only…..

Time is a myth

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I find I have slipped from one sense of time to another from month to month and from year to year in the last three years of chaotic awakening.

. As I have healed, as I have become a grown-ass woman and no longer a wounded adolescent, my relationships have changed.

In the climate of nowness, I am telling people, “I don’t do time.” What I mean by that is I have released the necessity of validating myself by the pulse of the beat between a desire or an event or the arrival of an Amazon package and that swack of the wish arrow into the bull’s eye. If I ” achieve” something quickly am I a more valuable person than if it takes me years?

I can feel that old addiction to adrenaline if I focus on time.

Alone with self

“Hurry up, hurry up or you will miss the train, the boat, the plane, the appointment, the opportunity. All will dissolve and fade.”

When these thoughts appear, I feel the flood of adrenalin surge as it rushes through my veins and my Fitbit will even report back to me my heart rate has gone up.

What if all of this projection about validation, about deserving, about achieving is created by my own thought energy?

And so I set out like a sandel-footed acolyte creating the no-path path with each step.

“Who am I now?” I ask myself. Then I drop the question into the void and turn away my narcissistic gaze.

Life is so much more peaceful without gripping like a starving child at the hand of time. Life is so much more peaceful without scanning the face of a person I meet to see if he or she loves me enough. Life is so much more peaceful when I don’t quiver in fear when I get a bill or pay my taxes.

At first, the feeling is of the life of a ghost creature. Who am I if I am not anxious, worried, fearful, and focused on achieving to prove I deserve to live?

Then nothingness appears. Then the sense of blankness appears. There is no avatar for transitioning.

receive the now

I spent years breathing through the storm of thoughts that showed up to lecture me, to urge me to audition to be me.

It is called faith. I had faith that eventually the release of time, and of identify and of chasing the rabbit like a greyhound on a track would be the correct behavior. What will happen without those defining neuroses?

Slowly things begin to appear in my life. I slept more deeply. I am no longer startled by abrupt sounds. I did not have flashes of trauma going through an intersection when I drive. I began to feel smooth and soft. The hard shell of defensiveness, the brittle layer of intellectual processing, the constant comparison of myself to another to see which one of us was the most something or another… just stopped.

I am most aware of my journey when I wake up. I call it surfacing. I float up from my dreams and my body becomes reborn as a casing, a home, a nurturing organism. I feel my bed under me and am grateful for its comfort and support. I extend the waking up process as long as I can. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

So I have given up time with the understanding that I am the creator of the time I live. And it stretches on and on like a desert of colored sand. I can go in any direction I desire. Now is perfect.

 

 

 

How do we understand ourselves?

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The measure of a man is a function of the methodology of assessment. When I put my feet on the floor next to my bed to push myself up into the day, I already begin the egoic interview. It is like being hired to fill the position of “self”.

How am I doing? I will inquire. How did you do yesterday? What have you achieved? What actions held virtue and which were simply a weak wristed attempt to burn up time?

All of these questions are the Ego’s job to assess how well I am protecting myself from mortality. “If you are not careful, “my bodyguard explains, “there will be trouble ahead.”

I have learned to treat this prodding and poking as no more than having an incredibly irritating four-year-old as a constant companion, I visualize this annoying brat as handing me calipers and tape measures to assess my success or failure as a human being.

However, I have gotten very practiced in refusing to fall for the attempt to make me feel weak and unsteady. My bodyguard wants to keep its job.

through the fire

My mind in this last year has become better and better at selecting my own, very personal criteria for living a life. The questions are so simple. “Did you sleep well? Did you feed yourself with foods that are supportive of your health? Did you learn something? Have you been loving and kind in your interactions with others?”

It makes life so much simpler when I refuse to appraise my value as a human being from outside criteria. My life is not a performance. I am not playing to an audience and hoping for applause. I have learned to drop envy and comparison. Those do nothing for my contentment with this present moment.

I am more childlike after 13 months of my exodus from public life. Each moment, each hour has a unique aspect to it. I see the white lilies bloom in the window against a backdrop of white, newly fallen snow. I find a recipe for soup I have had for years and enjoy preparing it for myself. My neighbour walks by knowing I am behind the drawn diaphanous curtains in my living room spending this day as I spend all days laying down with my leg elevated and she waves knowing I can see her.

stillness

It is like coming off of a drug, this year. I have had all of my toys, my trivial distractions removed and it is just me and my ego now. And the only way around the babbling repetitive negativity of that conversation is to choose to be at peace. And so I do.

Sannyasa: The Fourth Chapter of Life

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Awareness of the movements, chapters, seasons, and acts of life are distinctly different when viewed from a distance of age.

The contained existence in my childhood through grade school to high school was controlled, enforced, and structured. Those who lived before me had stories, egregores, and trauma-marked cells that surfaced in my own biological blueprint. That era, the abraiding of intersecting cultures wearing away to a single smooth surface of belief, I see as almost cult-like. We believed what we were taught to believe.

at 4 years old

My arrival on the earth was the year that WW II ceased. I shot out into a time of rabid hunger for growth. The depression reduced choices for my grandparents and in the childhood of my own parents. But NOW we were like the starving crowds let loose in a field of food. The norm was for us to gorge ourselves.

We paid close attention to what our neighbors had newly purchased. The fins on our cars grew to sci-fi proportions. We were propelled into competitive hedonism. My father bought the first TV set in our neighborhood. There was a cache´, an undisputable sense of status that a family could achieve instantaneously.

One could move ahead of the pack. One could be the house that people pointed to as they drove past. The Thunderbird in the driveway; the TV antenna reaching out beyond the roof to outer space; the books lining the bookshelf on hypnosis, self-improvement, some with bright pictures of modernist houses insistently and rebelliously sleek; the lounge chair covered in orange fabric in the living room that was impossible to sit upon no matter how one contorted the body, all signaled patriotic dedication to consumerism.

And so as I moved through my life, I watched the carefully cultivating craving. If only…. if only I could get good grades. If only I could graduate from university. If only I could earn a master’s. If only I could find a husband, a house, and have children. Always, always moving toward a goal whose dopamine hit of pleasure disappeared as soon as it was achieved. It was decades of crawling through the sand to arrive at a mirage.

I watched as the cultural imprint caused people to balloon from an average size of 6 to size 16. I watched as the slavish pursuit of power, pleasure, and fame became currency.

what did I buy?

Today, our striving for clout on social media is like showing a membership card to an exclusive club. I am acceptable to myself because I have masses of friends, masses of followers, a new dress, and a new achievement. But I also watch as the fleeting moments of the new sign of personal value fade away. It is like having an entry card to a club that disappears in the hand. It was once in my grasp. But now it is gone. That sense of being special so we can be considered normal haunts us.

I worked 70 to 80-hour weeks for decades in the hopes that I could be recognized as a valid human being. It was a caucus race as in Alice in Wonderland. Quickly run to nowhere so you can stay in place. This was my period in life when I was in hot pursuit.

But now, now I am in Sannyasa. In Hindu lore, this is the period of time past 70.

Everything and nothing

In Eastern society, it is believed that everything is already in existence. Art is already complete and it is only up to the artist to remove the unnecessary. And that is the explanation for this time of life.

We grow weary of the accumulation; the caucus race; the unfocused blind pursuit of goals that do not serve our souls. Instead of a list to accomplish, we now have the wisdom to discard the unrolling scroll of itemized effort in the day. It becomes easier to say, “Does this decision, this effort, or this action make me a better person?”

We are now able to discard the trivial as unsatisfying. The imprinting of my culture, because of when I was born was to run on a track of acquisition of things, of pleasures, of status bijoux objects.

And now, in this last stage of life, it is easier for us to understand ourselves. We no longer pay attention to what the culture requires of us. We drive through the images, the ideas, and the demands like a car plows through the rain. The water just rolls off. And we begin to divest ourselves of all the burdens that we were told were treasures to be held close. We free ourselves.

We understand that an accomplishment can be just to sit in the now and feel the wind passing over us. We watch the clouds so carefully that we can see they are moving.

We are doing something. We are learning to control the mind. We are learning to be inner-focused, to be at peace, and to keep our flame of compassion for others alight. We are finally beginning to understand our purpose. It is the time for that.

A Season of Change

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The last year has been challenging for me. To move, to sit, to walk felt like a sword was stuck straight into my hip joint with the pain travelling down into my knee and like a true baroque expression of torture becoming a strip of fiery shin splint.
I am an active person emotionally fed by physical challenges. I have managed my Airbnb single handedly for 12 years going as much as ten months without a day off. My garden was so magnificent that people who inevitably stop to smell the roses which I kept tall so the elderly would not have to bend down for the perfume.
But then COVID hit and I folded my dreams and plans like an ivory ribbon fan and stuck them away in a drawer. It was useless to pretend. The choices of denial, or angry resistance have never been something I am drawn to. I know how to wait out the shit storm in periods of disaster. You get that skill when you are over 70 or you risk looking like an imbecile toddler throwing a fit into the faces of innocent people caught in your spewing inability to absorb the vicissitudes of life. After a certain number of decades one should learn that the elevator goes up and it goes down sometimes even getting stuck for no reason.

Working with Ego

So I stayed home and turned inward dedicating myself to learning, reading, studying and coaching my clients. In October 2021 when I went on the surgical hip replacement list I had finally lowered my proud head and given up on toughing it out.
The entire year has been one of deep and abiding growth. Submission to what is was all I could do. My choice was to deepen my grounding practices or to thrash around in the net of constraint I was now caught within.
When it came to me as a metaphor I thought of it as “the last firing” of a piece of pottery. I had been glazed and now I would see my true colors appear.
There were days when as I struggled out of bed the first thing I would do would be to weep. It wasn’t vigorous athletic/dramatic/theatrical sobbing but more of just a leaking out of grief.
I was 77, 78, 79 and isolated from real life contact with others because I was minutely aware down to the smallest detail carved with statistics that my age cohort had no room for stupid.
The deepest lesson that I received was that I am fully, inexorably and fucking human. My emotions would arise and I had to make choices. Would this hour be one of wise decisions, resignation, or of internal vitriolic debate of self with self?
I kept my compass out. I kept coming back to the question: Who do you want to become?
And what I mean by that is not how do I present to others, or how much status or power I can accumulate. What I kept returning to was the pottery metaphor. My clay was being thrown about by hands other than mine. I was being burnished, polished, placed in a fiery kiln of apparent chaos and something was happening to me.
The consistent restrictions on movement, the chronic pain, the disengagement from groups, from normative behavior, the Egregore of society was a full on attack from all sides.
This is not particularly extraordinary to my life. Most people in the last three years have had their contract with life put in the shredder. We have all stood and watched it cut into thin strips.
It became so very clear to me that I had little understanding of what depression does in a life. Because I was used to enduring, I came to see that this very habituation to the dissociative state was my greatest scarring from my childhood. I had no urge to paint, to write, to send in poetry or stories. I was used up in not allowing despair to eat me alive.
“How long,” I asked myself, “How long have you gone to ground, become frozen and paralytic when you are in pain?”
And then I remember where it came from. As a toddler if I cried, I would be attacked physically. As a child in school I would have the “silliness” slapped out of me if I looked sad. So now I was deep into the initial wound.

at 4 years old

By nature, I think I am quite stoic but there was also a large part of the residual scarring in my experience of cruelty under the age of 6. It was violently taught to me that I had no rights to host the demons of negative emotions. Only my parents could be angry.
I could see how deep in ran in me. But now in this retreat in the hermit cave I faced the fact that I had to forgive myself for everything that made me human.
I am still and have been in pain for a year. Because of that, I will be triggered into the helplessness of no rescue in my early years. Who will protect me? Who will make it stop? There is no one.
But I have me now. And I have given myself permission to shut down and just tend to my body. I have given myself permission to see the victories I have achieved that don’t shine out into the world. They are private between me and me. All of it is the clarity of seeing how strong I have made myself.
And now it all changes. I am going through three surgeries in a month. I am promised a new hip.
So many of my ancestors were knights. They knew about battles, self discipline, stoicism and skill in the face of the enemy. I know my enemy has been my own ego and I feel the ancestors in me as I have faced the lesson these past three years. The sturdy warriors had the wisdom to leave old wounds and battles behind and trained for the next battle. They have much to teach me.

 

 

The knights in my ancestry

 

 

Learning How to Be.

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What can COVID teach us?

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I was thinking today about perceived reality (again and again). For many, there has never been the sense of waiting for something ‘out there’ growing and coming closer. For many, their lives have been predictable, safe, and they believed that their survival was due to their own merit. “I did this” was a shared delusion.

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And then there are others who have known this current sense of the ominous wait, this sense of fate, the out of my control formation of some new future.
There are those who lived through the depression and knew food scarcity. My mother’s family had six children and owned 2 pairs of shoes for their offspring. Daily, everything changed as they used up their resources and had to adapt for survival.
I remember clearly sheltering at home when school was done as I watched polio spread in my home town. The pool, the movie theatre, the parks were all dangerous. I lost friends. People were deformed for life or laying in an iron lung. It was out there… the unimagined threat. It could not be controlled. And so we waited. We were careful.
As a schoolchild, we heard the school PA go on and at the yelling out of the word “flash” at random times during the day, we huddled under our metal and wood desks. Across the river was a major port. We were told, when the bombs were dropped, it would be close to us. And so we waited and ducked.
One day at noon, I walked into the vast school cafeteria and it was dead silent. We were eating lunch with dry mouths. The Cuban missile crises was underway. A teacher told me it would all happen within 15 minutes. The missiles would be released to cripple the country in which I lived. The missiles would seek out the important ports and melt the area flat. Hundreds of us sat at the tables with our knees pressed against the underside of the table tops. We remember the flash training. We ate our lunch waiting to die.
When a group of people have had an unthreatened existence there is imprinting within them. They begin to think that it is through some merit of their own that they are healthy, that they can predict their own future. And the wounding it leaves on their psyches is that it destroys their compassion. They no longer understand “the greater good.”
They have never experienced the moments of ominous waiting for something that is formulating in the moments of hung time.
Covid is bringing us back to that feeling. We suddenly see that through no fault of our own, we could cease living or for some, even worse, be the one who carries death to others around us through our actions.
We are experiencing what all of those who have lived on the face of the earth have experienced in what we call “uncertain times.” Attacking tribes, sudden famines, plagues, homeless masses of people dislodged and migrant, economic disasters are all the same experience. We are thrown out into an unpredictable world. We see that it is not our own merit that protects us and gives us a good life. We see with stark outlines that it is our ability to react to the inevitable onslaughts as a united group that is, finally, our only protection.
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Virtue Signals and Promises

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On social media, I have observed a hair pulling and kicking in the knees caps type of fighting. One person calls out another with a snarling tone. “You are virtue signalling,” the troll that lives in feeds says in a deep, accusatory voice.

Beware those who have the unmitigated gall (or any other ancient tribal name such as Celt or Galli) to brazenly state that they are not face down in an alcoholic daze during COVID. They will be attacked.

Shut in

The social fetish with victimhood, suffering, repetitive self-destructive behaviour has become more fashionable during the COVID retreat for some. Post that you are day drinking, have put on ten pounds, no longer comb your hair or can’t stand the smell of composting armpits when you lift your arms and the congratulatory messages come flowing in like a waterfall under your Facebook status comment.

Some are applauding paralysis and dysfunction as if it were a superpower. It is, indeed, a strange time. It is an open competition for those who can be the most worst. It reminds me of a bicycle race where the person who stays upright and has covered the least ground is the winner.

Virtue signalling has saved my life. Each time I chose not to tumble down the cactus-covered hillside because I wasn’t watching my steps, I start to trust myself more. Each time I look at my options and ask the question, “Who do you want to be?” Or visualized the person my actions will create, I become more gently optimistic about my own ability to run my life.

When I work out instead of binge-watching Netflix, I talk to myself. I will say, “Look at you go!” I will keep track of my walking, my eating, my sleeping, my reading, my meditating so I can clearly observe my growth. It is a necessary part of my personal growth journey to virtue signal to myself and to others as well.

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There is another way, another path, another reality to step into when I pay attention to my small, mundane choices. Every decision creates an entirely new world. The tiniest act is powerful.

I watch a lot of HGTV and I have a clear sense that we are constructing the place we live within at this time in history. Our home is in our thoughts. And every time I rip out old inefficient wiring and have a more functioning pattern of thinking installed, I congratulate myself. And every time I rip out old inefficient wiring and have a more functioning pattern of thinking installed, I congratulate myself. And every time I rip out old inefficient wiring and have a more functioning pattern of thinking installed, I congratulate myself.

Keeping promises to my body, my health, my garden, my friends, my family makes me stronger and more trusting. I am not imprisoned by my own interior troll voice cackling gothic noises in the background.

Virtual signalling tells me, “Woman, you got this!”

It makes me stronger.

 

Mr. Robot

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I have just “found” the Mr. Robot series and it is enlightening to view it in the face of the disruption we are experiencing in the world today. Questions arise from the story’s script such as: “Who controls me?” and “Is anything I do originating from what I think of as self?”

During the turmoil that has arisen from societal dissatisfaction with hundreds of years of inculcated cruelty, institutionalized inequality and the resultant blatant public murders of those who are deemed lesser and of no value, people have begun to vibrate at a high rate of anxiety. The questioning of self is resulting in either a defensiveness of a person’s long-held views or a denial of the reality that seems to condemn what the person holds as the truth.

People react in various ways in order to disclaim their part in the system. They have a choice of saying, “It isn’t true. It is information that is being created to control my reaction.” Or they have a choice of saying, “I didn’t do anything. I didn’t know. It is too much for me, too big for me. I don’t have any power.  I am just standing here passively being a good person.” Or what we are seeing on social media is a third response which is growing stronger. “The people who are killed are at fault. They aren’t like me. They somehow deserve what happened to them.”

It is fascinating to see the philosophy of the early settlers winding through our world, still, in 2020. Preachers in Plymouth delivered hellfire sermons based on the philosophy that a person’s soul was either blessed by God or under the control of Satan before he or she was born. The signs that a person was anointed by God were found in skin colour, physical beauty, wealth, and perfection of health. To ensure that the devil did not rule children, it was recommended that children have the “devil” beaten out of them if they behaved badly.

And it was well known in the religious community that the mark of Cain was punishment. At some point after the start of the slave trade in the United States, many protestant denominations began teaching the belief that the mark of Cain was a dark skin tone,  Cain had killed his brother Abel and let Abel’s blood flow on the earth.

We think that we are in a world that is clear of the past and somehow balanced correctly in the now. But as we see how an inherited belief that the colour of a person’s skin is the result of some sin, some lack of being fully human, we start to wake up. We start to question everything that we have been inducted to believe in.


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An interesting example of how we view the world showed up on my social media feed. A man who understood how conditioning works explained that the map that Americans sit staring at in their 12 years of public schooling is nothing more than propaganda. The USA is placed in the dead centre of the world in order to reinforce the idea that America is special, the centre of the known universe. The other continents are not depicted in their actual sizes. The comparative size of the USA to other nations and of North America to other continents is inaccurate. Power is size. Power is being in the centre. And so the conditioning is ubiquitous. It is in every part of our social context.

What we are being driven to face is the question of what matters. Which of my actions has any inherent power?  Does it matter if someone I don’t know dies of COVID? Does it matter in my life if someone is living without clean drinking water? Does it matter if someone unlike me is being deprived of social justice?

We don’t like the feeling because it forces us to understand how we are formed. Each cell is a thought we have implanted in our concept of reality. We are so very uneasy with having to question all that we consider “normal”. It is painful. It is disturbing. It frightens us to a place where we feel like unprotected children and so we react like children.

As I was weeding my garden yesterday after viewing Mr Robot, I heard a question in my mind. “Is anything you think emanating from your own mind? Is everything you think just something you were taught, conditioned to believe, planted by some societal conditioning?”

I stood up with the weeds still connected to the roots swinging in my hand. And I knew. I suddenly knew. I had no way of knowing.

 

Wind Talking

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Today, I could feel the urge to slide down emotionally coming on again. It reminded me of the coal cellar chute we had under my house when I was young. It was dark down there and I was admonished in the ten commandment chiseled tone my mother could use when laying down the law to NEVER slide into that unseen space.

As I woke up, I remembered the visions from my viewing of the various streaming services I use to numb out before sleep. I had jumped from one documentary to another finding people who had set a goal, worked unflinchingly toward it and stood a healthy, tough, accomplished monument depiction of what a heroically dedicated senior looks like.

“Yes”, I thought to myself, “You will stop doing just enough, good enough, running along the tracks of the usual habits. Today you will dig your shovel into the coal pile of fuel and throw it into the furnace of ambition. Today will be a flame.”

After I took my pills and made coffee, my skin blossomed out like an aggressive tea rose with petals of hives. I couldn’t tell but it felt so pervasive, I imagined even the back of my eyeballs were swollen. My agenda made out so carefully by my personal assistant self was now out of the question.

“First, we cope.”

I took a Benadryl, slurped cups of water and lay down on my left side which is my poor- me baby curled position when I am sick. Just as I was about to fall into a drugged sleep my mind chirped at me, “You had a nap yesterday.” I ignored the nagging.

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So the urge to dig deep, make something happen, speak those words that would cast a spell so powerful it could lift a tsunami of curved lace waves to hit the shore had abated.

I heard the wind outside as I made my whatever the time it was now meal. The wind yowled at me to come outside.

I let the mind sit there in my skull under my twisting hair and walked barefoot to a garden bed. First from one direction, and then from another the wind confused the branches. Acid yellow pollen rained down onto the lawn. The sky shut gray and close to the earth when day began but now it was flickering from one picture projection of itself to another. Silver clouds opened up and the sideways sun took a stab at the earth.

There is something ineffable about a strong wind: It is primitive and savage. We have so little common understanding for the causes, the motivations of violent wind. We do not discuss in our lexicon of weather stories the first mover of the still air that makes it wild suddenly in our own backyards. We are so amazed that we cannot dismiss the force with a label of words. We stand amazed.

And lately the wind has been quixotic, unpredictable, blowing first hot and then cold. But always I feel a call to go stand in it especially when it is ferocious, multi-pronged, hysterical. I stood in the wind changing its mind surrounding me, my hair wrapping across my face and thought, “I want to be like that! I want to be so passionate that there are no words to describe me. I want to speak to the wind.”

I must ask my personal assistant for a new schedule.