There’s nothing like truly connecting with others in an extremely honest way.
Telling the truth. Saying what’s in your heart out loud. Speaking the “worst” words you think, or the awkward ones, the ones you’re worried about hurting others, the ones you’re always trying to delete.
It’s quite radical.
An hour ago as I write this, everyone left my little cottage who was here spending time and moving through the experience of clearly identifying, questioning, and opening up to how we relate to “thought” in a new way.
We become interested in this through noticing (OK, being tortured by) stressful thoughts.
What an amazing thing to even consider there’s another way. An alternative to believing frightening things, uncomfortable things, dreadful things.
One of the most profound places of suffering (hint: it happens almost every time you hate, criticize or judge someone else) is noticing how when you feel anxious and threatened, even from an old memory, it often goes a bit sideways with three options, and that’s it.
Here’s what I’ve experienced:
You see that person doing that thing, saying those words. It’s scary.
You’re threatened.
You decide you need to escape, fight or freeze in the presence of the threatening thing or person.
Just get back to homeostasis, says the whole organism. Get away from the scary thing!
And then the pain enters as the mind chatters with how upset it is you had to go through that terrifying situation, and you never want it to happen again, you never want to think about it, you’ve got to get away, or destroy it, and you have to feel better ASAP.
Then, here’s where it starts getting more difficult, I notice.
You start in on threatening yourself.
How you could have avoided it, like retroactively making it so it didn’t happen.
You should have done it differently. You dunce! What’s wrong with you? Just give up. Run away. What a coward. How embarrassing. You’ll never learn!
It really hurts, this vicious, violent self-talk.
But who would you be without your story that you’re doing it wrong?
Who would you be without your perception of the world as a threat (in the form of that mean person)?
Who or what would you be if you remembered, and felt the impact, and the heart-break, and you didn’t run, freeze or implode or attack yourself, or anyone or anything else?
Not denying it didn’t happen.
Not pretending it’s different than it is, not faking you feel happy when you don’t.
Not believing it all, as Truth.
Not making it MORE than it is, LESS than it is. Not formatting into something to make it easier to digest or impossible to digest.
Just not thinking it with such passion and voracity and intensity.
Without thinking YOU made a mistake or did it wrong or it needs to be changed….
….what would this be like?
I notice whenever I have a thought about me doing it wrong, I’m scared of someone else also, that THEY think I did it wrong. Maybe the person who thought I did it wrong came from the distant past, or the more recent past, but these thoughts about me and how I wasn’t enough or did it poorly only appear when I think someone else thought it first, or might.
Who would I be without the belief I wasn’t enough, or wrong?
Free.
Free to cry, sob, ask for help, say I’m sorry, hug, love, move, live, show up, go on, be a regular human, with all kinds of human emotions.
I might even, without being stuck in thoughts against myself or others, begin to live another kinder way (most likely).
I turn the thoughts around: I did the best I could. So did they. There is nothing threatening me….now. I do NOT have only three choices: freeze, run away, or go to war. I have an unknown, unseen movement of life bursting up through me, expressing as this person, and it’s all temporary, and I’m here. Ready. Alive.
I have other options, like standing in the middle of a cacophony of sounds, thoughts, words, calls for help….
….and opening my arms to this next moment, and the next, with integrity, with action, with joy, with gratitude, with tears.
What an amazing question, to wonder who we would be without our stories of self-hatred or no-way-out.
Here’s my friend Jeff Foster (I don’t know him personally, but I love calling him my friend because it feels like he is). He’s a great example of a living turnaround of what it’s like without believing your thoughts, about yourself, others, life, death, the past, the future. Plus he’s hilarious.
Much love,
Grace