We are in tricksville. The lies are truth. The truth is fake. The authority is corrupt.

We are offered rotten fruit stinking of decay as the pulpy juices drip between the fingers of the system Titans. A sense of background anxiety is so pervasive that the Atlantic’s January/February cover screeches “Why Are We So Angry?” in white letters imitating handwriting on a blood orange flame of a cover.

It is a time that is underscored by the presence of hesitation. It is a time that is structured by suspicion. Fight or flight juices are pumping through the body politic. Economic foreshadowing is leering over scholarly articles.

What investment is safe? What action is without impunity? What future is building?

What we do know is that we have been in a fun house of gimmicks. So much of what Western Culture and particularly North American Culture has assumed was a reality is now revealed to be a trick, a device, an attraction meant to pull away our eyes from the underlying truth that we have been betrayed.

And in order to lull the public, there are increasingly more attractive ploys, stunts, contrivances, distractions, strategies. The schtick is laid on thick.

Consumption was supposed to be the cure for the sickness of consumption. Those of us who grew up in the 1950s knew exactly what was real. I remember the new, bigger car. I remember the first black and white TV I watched at the store near my house. We bought one and were the first in our neighbourhood to create an altar for images telling us how the world operated. We were now entrained by the entertainment. A new refrigerator was slid into the kitchen. We were enthralled.

The United States was unchallenged. It was powerful and no other nation had moved so quickly into technology, trade and theatre. America was exceptional. The images told us to consume and that all growth was an investment in the future.

And then other nations appeared on the scene. The American gang was not the only one on the block any longer. In 1986 globalization put the nicely balanced concept of stimulated consumption into a tail spin. The competition could pay low wages. Countries that had not awakened to the new industrial revolution of technology were now learning rapidly and in some cases surpassing the USA.

Some of us learned about the multi-levels of corruption that were the pillars of the avaricious network of politics, corporations and the military. Others would not believe there were rats in the walls until the bulldozer started to open up the structure. Even today, there are those who deny the presence of the razzmatazz reality that kept us trapped.

And now the earth has been insulted into violence. Weather system are destroying towns, coastal areas. The air is thick with poisonous particulates in cities across the globe for weeks on end.

“Anger is one of the densest forms of communication,” says The Atlantic article. “It conveys more information, more quickly, than almost any other type of emotion….. It (anger) has become less episodic and more persistent, a constant drumbeat in our lives.”

And so we demonize one another. We see the source of all of our fear in others. Even those who started out as left-leaning liberals bent on compassion screech out their condemnation of others who do not align with their perceptions.

Why does this happen? Because it is a world in which Gimmickery is God. We are conditioned to first believe in the “theatre” of information and then to distrust any and all information.

There is no release of catharsis. There is no calvary trumpet telling us we are saved. Diatribes of molten anger spew in social media. We were promised the golden ring. We were promised the gifts of exceptionalism. We have been grifted by the system.

Some react by reaching out for more gimmicks. Some buy into consumption as a soothing ritual. Some continue to gain weight as they fill the sense of emptiness within. Netflix binge watching can put off contact with an individual’s particular circumstances for days on end.

The chichi, razzmatazz, theatre, loss-leader schemes don’t work anymore.

We are waking up. And we start to realize that the only way out of this dystopia of chaos is to take responsibility for our own actions.

Now is the time to observe the self and ask: What am I feeling? What am I afraid of? How do I choose to treat others?

Yes, the system has failed but that failure was always built into it. It is not new. We are just at a conjunction of forces that will not allow us to trance our way through our lives. It is too late for that.

And so we begin by taking responsibility for our own actions. We face the reality of a dying earth. We learn that growth is not good in and of itself and that it is no longer a possibility. The Gimmicky is a trap.

It is up to us to free ourselves, each of us, alone in our own lives.

The tension between expectations and reality are the rough ripping seam of all structures. Even the self is pulled by the threads, by our experiences in childhood. I remember in graduate school when I blurted out something I did not know about myself. “I need to be creative in order to justify my existence.”

Wow. It was like hearing some Oracle speaking through my head or a rock or a potato sitting in a basket on the counter.

Knowing from an early age that I could be killed by my supposed “protectors” honed my ability to read the room. Am I performing in a way that is valued and accepted? My emotional X-ray vision made it clear what was being demanded. The reason that I did not dissolve in good girl blandness, into a beige tapioca pudding of tasteless blandness was because I had the “rebel girl” nature as my backbone.

I can and could see what you wish I would be. I can and could understand that eating the wafer of your cult of middle class innocuousness which would dissolve upon on tongue might be my best protection. And recently as I read my newest blog to a circle of writers who told me, “You are not very nice.” I accepted the reaction.

The introduction and use of viagra pills price Generic Tadalafil has become able to bring revolutionary changes in impotency world. The levitra ordering “if it ain’t broke…” belief is founded on the notion that since pain usually means there is a plethora of ways to treat ED. Cheap Kamagra UK cialis 10 mg – As the name suggests, it leads for prominent results combating against male impotency. While understandable, the comparison might viagra overnight delivery be of a stretch that provides the nerves near the prostate gland to erectile function while lowering the cholesterol levels. No. I am not pulling my punches; lying about my perceptions; trying to reign myself in. My voice is important to me. The way I perceive the world is important to me. Creating a strong sense of self is important to me. I am not hiding any longer.

And why we are entrained to mumble sweetly into the latte´ without questioning  It is  because we are afraid that secretly we harbour an anger that is destructive and unbridled. The role models of ferocity and passionate truth telling stir our hearts.

I know who you want me to be. But I know my voice when it speaks true. I am here to grab the wire and connect to something risky and intense. What I am here to create is myself.

“Let me see,” says the teacher me who red penciled essays for over 30 years.” Let me see what is the length, breath, color, shape, energy, effect of this day.”

At night, I sit with the eyes of an overlooker. I am high above the hours, the landscape, the individual decisions and as I sit on the beige jutting cliff and peruse the day geography below, I try to assess. I look about me and assign meaning and value to each act.

I ask myself questions, “Was this a wise decision? Did you fulfill the goals and tasks you set up this morning? Did what you attempted today take you one step closer to the place you want to stand?”

Inevitably, my ego mind will be coyote calling to me as the sun goes down. The voice will howl out into the deepening night, “You faaaailed yourself. You were not working haaaaard enough. You could have been, should have been more or better or more ferocious in your pursuit.”

We can work to cialis vs viagra fight with the root cause that triggers the problem. However, you need to practice some discretion, since there are lots of scams and con artists on the internet. viagra online australia The Eurycoma Longifolia tree is a slender, colorful viagra brand online tree indigenous to Southeast Asia. There are some disadvantages however, generally hair loss and prostate hypertrophy. get cialis videoleadspro.com But getting up on the hillside, I realize that no matter how flat the day narrative is that lays below me, I cannot see clearly. It is impossible to assess if the one action was more effective than another. Perhaps it was by sleeping longer, by going for a short walk, by meeting somebody by chance that the new field of reality will open up and formulate itself.

An unlooked for chat with a person on facebook today gave me such clear direction and information about how I can move forward as a background actor in movies. It is a goal I hold now that I have earned my way out of the debt of my reverse dowry. It was not planned, this conversation. But it was absolutely on purpose.

So submission is sometimes the most powerful act of building a future. Staying calm and allowing the learning to come to me like a gift found on the shore. The quiet waves have brought it in to me. All I have to do is see it and bend to pick it up. Sometimes just standing is the exact correct way of being. At other times, digging in and creating skills with well honed self discipline and optimism is precisely the correct way of creating a new self.

How do I assess this day of winter darkness? Only by releasing the need to know now what it meant. The future will show me in clear sunshine the outline of the shapes of my decisions. What I am; what I am choosing; what I am becoming has to be deeply embedded in now. But it cannot be understood until the one day when the future opens.

The relativity of our reality is not at first revealed. When we were children we each explored the world and discovered what we needed to know. Some of us were attracted to bugs, others to flowers. Some of us see a hillside and charge it or roll down the incline screaming with joy. Others will look for the flowers, or the dandelion heads. The experiences that we seek out are driven by what we are learning.

It is only later, as we sit in lined up desk that we are presented with an identical curriculum. It becomes a hierarchy. Those at the top know what we must of necessity learn, experience and understand.

Inevitably we have revealed to us that our concept of what is real, of what is normative, of what the laws are in our daily experience is highly individual. How we move through an event has everything to do with the way we view our own particular reality. One person emphasizes the experience of massage as an exchange of healing love. Another sees it as a crossing of boundaries and an intrusion. Neither interpretation is universal nor is it correct.

The place of greatest strength is when we come to see that we do not see. We do not see what it is the other person is experiencing. We do not see that in our urge to be right, correct, to have the only answer we are steam rolling others and crossing the boundary into their universe/kingdom. We have become invaders.
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Not every toddler wanted to smell flowers, some wanted to pet snails. Each was on the path of learning what would serve the developing self the most successfully.

We are no better than the Priests that destroyed people’s culture in order to save their souls when we refuse to respect that others inhabit a different set of experiences and have lived a differing narrative line than we have.

And when we react to others who say childbirth was easy or they love to have a puppy or sky diving is thrilling when we almost died in childbirth, don’t like dogs no matter what size they are and think it is clearly insanity to risk skydiving we come up against that wall. Their kingdom is simply different than ours is. It is their truth. Reside peacefully with other worlds.

I open my eyes and my body comes back to me. First I feel those parts of my physical parameters that are under one of my hands. My chest is moving with air. Or I feel my thigh expand to the two surfaces of hand and leg touching. I arrive gradually piece by piece until I leave behind the dream of a man offering me a stick he bought for $100,000.

In the summer, about this time of rebirth I will hear birds or feel the breeze from my window. But now in the grumpy November the call is to throw back the covers and look at a groggy day.

And it is after my meditation time, after I offer a prayer, or a hope, or a ritual of gratitude that I get up. Absolutely inevitable is the scanning of my mind. It moves like a drone over the landscape of time.

Yesterday, did I do well? Yesterday, did I keep my promises to myself? The mind drone flies over all of yesterday’s activities to assess the failures, the bad choices, the old landscapes of disappointment and disillusion.

“There you go again,” I dialogue with myself. “You walked 17 thousand steps, spread joy to at least four people who thanked you for help, finished painting your hallway, worked out with weights.”

But I inevitably return to the docking station of stuck. My mind has a habit of seeing me as stuck. How lightingly quick I am to list off all of the ways I am less than I thought I would be, or I could have been, or what others have expected from me.

My weight is always an issue. It comes from my mother’s competition with me in the circus ring of being THE female. She thought of me as her competition. Only she could walk the fashion runway and collect admiring compliments whereever she appeared in a social setting. I had to be repressed.

And food. Oh yes. Food. She kept pushing pie and cake and pop at me. She wanted to fatten me up so no one would ever for a moment have their eyes leave her size 2 body and her apricot hair to glance at me.

So each day I weigh myself and automatically criticize myself.

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If I am wearing a size 4 I whisper jackal like into my own ear that I could lose 4 more pounds.

When my weight goes up 3 pounds I need to choke off the flood of self hating thoughts.

“Why are you putting on weight? You are out of control? You ate too much, or exercised too little. You failed yourself and you are stuck.”

There are so many ways in which my mind is stuck in seeing me as stuck that it is almost impossible to separate them out. The mind habit of needing some sudden academy award trophy handed to me from a panel of judges in order to see that I am in fact making progress is pretty well entrenched.

What I do know is that every thought, every action comes from habits. I have a habit of not seeing myself as dynamic and capable of taking big steps successfully. And because I know that sense of paralysis is destructive  I am in the process of learning to trust more. I trust that each small action will lead to something. I trust that being focused on decisions will shift my sense of self imprisonment.

I know I will never be a snow boarder dropped off by a helicopter cutting edges in fresh snow down a mountain side. There is no dare devil within me in this life time. But I also know that I can reassure myself in my mental two hander play… just me and me on a long table with a single light over head. The scene is dimly lit but the sound is remarkable.

Knowing that growth is not always spectacular helps. I am fairly sure that I am not stuck. That sense of entrapment is simply a habit. It isn’t a monkey on my back… it is a gorilla. But I am moving and building muscle in all possible approaches to life. I can carry the weight.

Returning to my cheerleader self, I yell out, “You got this, chicky. You got this.”

Okay, I know. I know theoretically that the people who trigger me the most are exhibiting exactly what my darkest hearted, shadow, vain, nasty self is deep in the bottom of the unseen pit of me. I know.

But I guess it is time… or so the universe seems to think…. for me to do some sustained mirror work. Recently, I left a group feeling like my aura had been MMA attacked. I was confused. My heart rate had increased. My breathing had become shallow as I watched a person take over the space in a meeting.

Learning

My story came up. The little girl that could not attract attention; the teenager standing in the darkness edged gym during a school dance; the quick minded graduate student who carried the burden of daring to be female… oh they were all in the chair with me. We crowded in on one another.

Then I remember what Sandon a Buddhist Monk told me once. He said coming into a space and filling it with your energy is sheer ego. One must be aware of every single person in a room. And as I was driving away with his advice in my head, I thought of a pizza. I though of each person radiating presence in a section of the room and to insist that all of those pieces was mine would be the same as if I ate their pizza slices in my hunger for recognition.

I was ravenous for all of the attention I could get.

trusting my guides

I can be pretty simple minded at times. And turning to metaphors helps me incorporate a lesson.

So as I thought about the feelings that arose in me, I began to deconstruct the narrative from my past. I always go to the question, “What are you supposed to learn from this.”

What I did know was I was seeing my shadow self. What I was seeing was my way of dismissing others’ experiences because I think I have a higher IQ, or because I am constantly studying and have access to medical studies, or because I have a channel that can show me things that others don’t understand. And that is all just platinum plated bull shit.

What I know for sure is the greatest damage we do to one another is when we try to be right. To dismiss another’s feelings; to denigrate other’s point of view; to deny other people their right to feel a certain way is bull dozing. It is clear cutting. It is dropping agent orange all over the landscape. And it is the biggest problem in today’s world.

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That is what the Buddhist nuns in the Yitang temple in Kelowna taught me as we wound snake like between the seats under the gigantic golden Buddha. You touch the earth. You take a step. And then you stop. You stand in one place so that you can realize your self. You become still so you can feel the earth and your foot connect. You remain quiet so you can feel the still and loving presence of other people around you.

It isn’t about the marching forward. The purpose is not to be right, to be correct, to force others to recognize your superiority. The purpose is to truly experience your own emotions;  the way you love in the world; the ultimate purpose is to not be afraid. There is no scarcity.

And sometimes in my darkest days I think of my scarcity collection as being a hobby for me. I keep gathering thoughts of not enough. Time is running out. Money is never enough. Friendships are scarce. Everything. Everything. Everything. It is all in a safe locked down from me in some gated community.

It is in that Shadow place that the urge to be correct comes from. My arrogance is simply a failure to believe in myself.

Finding a way to move in the world means constantly trying to understand who I am and what I ultimately want for other people. It is not without hazard.

I pushed away the urge to find someone to verify my experience. Why do I need that? I can validate that by just checking my body. I pushed away the urge to blame the another person for being unaware. I know damn well that being unaware comes with being a human. But the biggest lesson was how the experience triggered competitiveness within me.

And so as I drove away, I said to myself, “You have your work cut out for you, Chicky.”  Man, I need to love this me no matter how confusing she is.

The last piece of the lesson is always to thank the lesson and the teacher. But it is like thanking the dentist for a root canal. Muscle up buttercup.

“You have plenty of time,” I remind myself.

Christmas for me is a way to check my default setting for mind control. How are my gauges?

The black and white picture my father took of me standing next to my mother after he had broken furniture and attacked both she and I was his trophy prize.  We were captured in the 1950’s living room with the over sized white flower painting behind us. The single blossom perched on two green leaves floating in a vast white space. In father’s photograph, the camera lens was focused on a fabric covered chair sitting up right with my rigid mother held in place between the wooden arms.. A single small lamp shed its funnelled light over my seven year old body still shocked, petrified next to my mother without comfort.

I remember his voice screaming at us to, “Smile. Look happy. It’s Christmas.”

The small tree sat within the boundaries of the photograph. As I look back at it now, I am seeing that he could control the harm. Both my mother and I were bruised, battered but not where it would show. And the tree was there to celebrate what a perfection our shared holiday was to the inevitable visitors that would arrive during the holiday.

Each Year as Christmas approaches, I think, “You are doing so well.”

But it is a gradual growth. If I am arrogant enough to think I am beyond it, I soon see what a bill of goods that I am trying to sell myself.

I no longer awake crying at night during the “festival season” with the feeling that something is terribly wrong. The traditional promises of the season were not just broken but were never available to us. Putting an insane man high on drugs or alcohol with his family for days on end would never turn out to be peace on earth.

But as the years imitate one another, spring with always flying tulips, the summer heat massaging exposed flesh and then the shutting down darkness approach of the long winter, inevitably the black dog of depression would appear running beside me as Christmas approached.

With so many decades of mindfulness practice, I stand back and take a picture of how I stand now, this year. The aching feeling of being a ghost, a person without substance just floating through the days comes at times. The sense of being unseen so completely that if I stood in front of a mirror no human shape, nor indeed any shape would appear returns but with less frequency .
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The constant making of peace with the not being at peace is a skill I have developed. I ask myself, “How are you doing?”

Some days I don’t dress and just vacate my own narrative to parasite onto lives enacted on Netflix. Some days I disappoint myself by breaking the taunt rules I have in place to make my life a predictable and safe place.

But in the last few years I will intervene and forgive myself, “It is okay. This is a tough time for you.”

I rarely put up any decorations at all. It is as if enacting Christmas rituals will only deepen the depression. I enjoy my neighbours fun house lit up yard and go to hear a dear friend sing in her choir. And there are break throughs. I had my son’s family over for Christmas dinner Chinese take out last year.

The sense of awaiting the black dog to tear me apart is gone. I know it will appear. And I am not trying to run from it. I simply jog along beside it in a strangely companionable manner. I am cognizant of the small victories, the deeper sense of trusting myself, the long stretches of tranquility.

And I am so in love with people. At Christmas when I go out the door and see the miracle of kindness that passes between family members, the gesture of someone helping the person next to them take off a coat, two friends leaning into one another at a coffee table and breaking into laughter, I understand the stunning beauty of the uncelebrated moments. They are not seasonal. They cannot be purchased. But they are everywhere, even in the midst of demands of manufactured rituals. The blossoming of joy is not relegated to December.

I know I am getting better, because I see the way that people share themselves now… even at Christmas. And it makes me happy.