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February 1 , 2007
GETTING HONEST ABOUT HONESTY
Honesty is generally taken to be an unquestioned good in relationship. But before we toss around the notion of honesty as some kind of rock-solid virtue, let’s ask: Honest about what? If we are, for example, being honest about what we want -- upfront, clear, and straightforward -- are we also being honest about what’s driving such want, or what we’re hoping that our honesty will bring us, or what we’re, for strategic or less than noble reasons, not being upfront, clear, and straightforward about?
So let’s be honest about honesty: There is more to it than meets the eye. I may, for example, tell you that I want you to be honest with me, giving you appreciation when you let me know, say, that you are angry at me -- and I may think that I am doing a good thing, in encouraging you to be more outfront, more emotionally transparent and expressive. At the same time, however, I may simply be doing this because it allows me to stay in control; however benignly I am overseeing your state, I am still overseeing it, making sure that the focus on what isn’t working so well in our relationship is on you, and remains on you.
Let’s take this a bit further, reversing the roles: You may say, in apparent honesty, that you really want me to be honest with you, even if I think that it’ll upset you, but you are not actually being all that honest, if only because you’re not openly and clearly sharing -- and therefore not being honest about -- your core motivation for wanting me not to hold back from you. It’s not that you really want me not to thus hold back, but rather that you want to be in a position where you are calling the shots, however obliquely.
And even if you were honest about your wanting to be in control, you would need to make sure that your delivery of this was not being animated by the desire to garner some strokes for your confession -- that is, you would need to make sure that you weren’t, through such confession, still trying to be in control, if only of my response. To truly expose your wanting to be in control, you would have to let go of any expected outcome, which would, of course, leave you vulnerable and, yes, potentially out-of-control.
How honest can we be if we’re operating from our conditioning, and don’t know that we are doing so? There are levels of honesty. We cannot be honest at a level with which we have little or no intimacy. Unfortunately, we may nonetheless still act as if we are indeed being honest at that level, when in fact we are not. This means, among other things, that we need to recognize where we’re standing, and have the humility to admit where we cannot yet stand. No shame in this -- just genuine honesty, the honesty to admit our inability to be honest at certain levels and under certain conditions.
Honesty and honor not only share the same linguistic ancestry, but are also deeply intertwined. Can we have honor without honesty? I don’t think so. To be truly honest with others is to honor them, to not in any way violate the sanctity of their being; we may not say everything to them, but what we do say is truthful, and what we don’t say doesn’t need to be said. This is the essence of real honesty, alive through and through with self-illuminating discernment, as well as genuine care for the other.
I honestly don’t have much more to say, at least for now. Someone once said that an honest politician is one who, when bought, stays bought. Let us do what we can to raise our capacity for honesty to a higher level, beginning with being honest about our dishonesty as best we can. In all honesty, there probably is not a much better place to begin.
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February 7 , 2007
WHERE PROSE REPORTS, POETRY UNVEILS
I lay my flesh upon this broken bed
Letting pillows of pure space have my head
Letting these multi-horizoned replays
Ripple through this infinite of days
Brushing back the edges of dreaming
Erasing every handhold of meaning
I lay my flesh upon this dying earth
Sinking too deep to care about rebirth
Blazing green wildlands too vivid to recall
Hugely breathing, valley, peak and shining all
Forest lungs singing green, so green, soaked in green
Enwrapping me in what cannot be seen
I lay my flesh upon this burning contingency
Until I’m drawn into pure transparency
Where one touch, one fingertip signature
Lighter than even this dreamt breeze
Ruptures a million tiny sacs of certainties
Until only love’s true shape remains
I stretch my flesh over this unbroken sky
Until it is but holes, clearings in bare space
Emptying me into a freedom beyond choice
Silence undresses me, giving me its voice
Making more than sense out of the abyss
So that I’m awakened by all that exists
There is no greater kindness than this
Poetry is simply prose gone native, prose on the loose, skinny-dipping in felt significances of all sizes, arranging itself so as to maximize the odds that it won’t be read like standard fare, nor like a handful of symbols, nor like something in need of dissection.
Poetry says a lot without saying or having to say a lot, being just as intimate with existential paradox as it is with these soapy dishes that don’t give a damn if whoever’s washing them is young or old, wise or foolish, loose or tight, sinking or rising.
Poetry is what happens when we are outwritten by what we are writing, and not just outwritten, but outdanced, outshone, outlived.
Poetry wings the ordinary and roots the extraordinary.
Where prose reports, Poetry unveils. Where prose marches, Poetry dances. Where prose makes sense, Poetry makes more than sense.
Prose proclaims the mystical to be ineffable, but Poetry gives it a voice, daring to express the supposedly inexpressible, while providing its audience with hearing aids and front-row seats.
Poetry is best read — and heard — in a state of natural intoxication, with no time constraints and with all the senses attuned to the slightest stimulation.
Poetry should not be so much read as imbibed, perhaps after releasing its juices with an unapologetically deep bite or two. No bibs. No napkined abyss. Don’t touch Poetry with gloves; seize it, hold it close, smell and taste it, go skin-to-skin with it, squeeze into its silences, navigate and ride its waves, get intimate with its mystery, making room for some messiness and turbulence in your relationship with it. Get into it until it is no longer an it.
Poetry is evocation, incantation, excavation, nakedly dancing articulation. Surrender to its spell, letting it inhabit you, live you, rearrange and change you. Instead of thinking about it, feel it, feel it with all of you, feel into and through it, letting what’s between you and it thin to nothing. Let it take over your headquarters for a while. Let it touch you. Let it slip past your defences. Don’t try to figure it out; feel your way into it, just as you would with a dream. Don’t expect an answer, but rather more intimacy with depth, and perhaps also with the depth that’s beyond depth...
This silken glide
This succulent ride
This ecstatic dying
This joy beyond trying
This melting mutuality
This everwild commonality
This rupturing rapture
This which no words can capture
This pleasure beyond pleasure
This depth none can measure
This the heartland of bliss
This the Holy Deep’s naked kiss
This, this the art
that cannot be framed
This, this the beauty
that cannot be named
This, this the love
that cannot be contained
Before you is a blank page or screen. Close at hand is a pen or keyboard. Start writing. Start with anything. Just get the valves open and the juices flowing. There’s a link between your fingertips and your creative brain; hook yourself up to it, be its highway, and take a ride where the unexpected is what’s expected. Write without any parent or teacher or expert looking over your shoulder; write as if you are dancing with no one watching, not even your own mind. Write until you are being written through; it’s a lovely way to step out of time.
And don’t worry about rhyme or meter or style; whatever you do is you. So what if what you put forth is rough, unkempt, messy, or wearing its slippers to the drugstore? When it’s time, your poetics will take on its most fitting form. And maybe that form will be seemingly chaotic or untidy; if so, so be it. We are all poets, every last one of us, no matter how prosaic our disguise, just waiting to bust loose...
Each parting cracks our heart
But nothing gets broken
Except the illusion that we’re apart
The cracks widen letting in
A light too vast to be spoken
Let the space between the cracks expand
Until we vanish into love’s primal demand
Each parting brings intense aching
But nothing is breaking
Except our nostalgia for tomorrow
All this stormy heart-hurt
Takes us to the heartland of sorrow
Guiding us through all the fuss
Until separation cannot separate us
Each parting crucifies our attachment
Our ribcage sudden sky
It’s not our heart that cracks
But what we’ve around it built
A guardian from a younger time
Crumbling to less than dust
As all constructions must
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February 14 , 2007
TOWARD A HEALTHY PATHOLOGIZING
A couple of days ago, I dug out an old essay of mine about pathologizing, specifically healthy pathologizing. An oxymoron? No, but it’s easy to see why it might be viewed as such, given how most pathologizing is arguably just as dysfunctional as what it is so negatively categorizing. Though the essay does remain a bit academic in places (I first wrote it while I was doing my doctorate in Psychology), despite my reworking of it, I still have a fond spot for it and its message...
So here it is:
Yes, but first some background...
Implicit in the usual notion of mental health is satisfactory -- or culturally acceptable -- adaptation to preset social and ethical norms. If we consistently enough think and behave in accord with what in our culture is generally taken to be healthy or normal, then we will very likely be given a solid stamp of mental health. However, if our excursions or deviations from the norm exceed a certain range, and if we’re also far from being part of a majority, then we will probably be saddled with our culture’s most “fitting” psychopathological (psychopathology being the study of psychological and behavioral dysfunction) labels and remedies.
But if our culture itself is seriously diseased or dysfunctional, then of what real value is adaptation to it, other than providing organismic survival or the acquisition of certain navigational skills? Whether we like it or not, adaptation carries its own consequences, its own responsibilities. Following or conforming to orders is a poor alibi, as history has shown. Who sets and judges cultural standards? And who judges, or is in a position to judge, the judges of what is culturally “good”? Difficult questions, these, implying as they do a moral hierarchy, the activation of which also tends to activate the corresponding abuses of such a structure.
Furthermore, when we look at what is apparently aberrant -- ranging from the paranoid meanderings of a psychiatric patient to the can’t-sit-still hyperactivity of a deskbound gradeschooler -- are we actually open to detecting any “sense” in what is being said or done, or have we already closed ourselves to hearing or attuning to the depths of what such behavior may be conveying or trying to convey?
Consider the commonplace defining of mental health as freedom from anxiety. This view, which implies that the ongoing presence of anxiety signals a lack of mental health, is little more than a green light for tranquilizing “remedies” -- not just psychiatrically prescribed drugs, but also cigarettes, alcohol, cannabis, television, orgasm, and fatty carbs. If we are not supposed to be anxious -- worry is okay, being milder, socially acceptable anxiety -- then we will likely feel even worse when we are anxious, informing ourselves that we are lacking in mental health. Abnormal. Screwed-up. The very non-acceptance of anxiety -- classifying it as maladaptive -- is itself an injuriously pathologizing gesture, driving us, in most cases, toward those “solutions” deemed most suitable by our culture.
When Thomas Szasz famously claimed that “mental illness is a myth,” he did not, as some critics have concluded, necessarily mean that those phenomena labeled as constituting mental illness do not exist, but rather that they should no longer be viewed as illnesses. This would, if generally accepted, be useful insofar as those burdened by such “phenomena” would no longer be classified (or generally thought of) as inferior or lesser. Discarding the stigma of being “mentally ill” would then be a step toward restoring human dignity, and also toward recognizing that we’re all doing time in the same asylum, helpers and helpees alike.
Nevertheless, there is a danger here, namely that of -- under the banner of misguided egalitarianism -- cutting ourselves off from the bare reality, experiential significance, and, yes, teachings of such “phenomena,” by making it wrong to view them through psychopathological lenses.
What if psychopathology itself was viewed not as a problem by those who have left or oppose the psychiatric status quo -- with its biological reductionism, anti-spiritual bias, ecological illiteracy, and diagnostic superficiality -- but rather as an inevitable and potentially valuable part of Life, a study at best choosing to be intimate with so-called madness?
Szasz hints at this, however unintentionally, by calling mental illness “a myth.” In wanting to do away altogether with the notion of mental illness, he doesn’t seem to recognize the possibility of a healthy pathologizing, of making unsanitized, euphemism-free, de-romanticized, truly compassionate room for the unacceptable, the sordid, the homely or subterranean, the bizarrely visionary, the apparently nonsensical or crazy or weirdly exceptional facets of self.
The professional abuse of pathologizing -- as when all of the “illness” is put on the patient’s side, and all of the “health” on the psychotherapist’s -- does not necessarily mean that pathologizing is itself intrinsically wrong. When it is taken literally, it may be granted undue solidity -- as in typical psychiatric diagnosis -- or it may be seen as an indignity, a straitjacketed, injurious labeling, as in Szasz’s view.
However, when psychopathology -- the naming and taxonomy of our inner “demons” and weirdnesses -- is not taken literally, but is rather viewed and treated as a kind of myth-making or archetypal fantasy, it then has the capacity to affirm and strengthen, both spiritually and psychologically. Mythology and pathology are not so far apart, sharing much of the same fantastic imagery, language, and themes.
To be truly understood, myths require a context that is not only metaphorically literate and poetically attuned, but that is also myth-transcending. Like myths, psychopathology needs a transrational perspective (that is, both transcending and including rationality), wherein both the imaginal riches of the mythical and the panoramic tolerance of the truly rational can beneficially coexist. For such a perspective, mental health does not mean the absence of those states commonly labeled as constituting mental illness, but rather the capacity to make compassionate and genuinely interested room for such states, without necessarily adopting their viewpoints.
And where does this lead? Toward intimacy with that with which we “normally” don’t want intimacy.
Essential to mental health is the ongoing practice of uncovering and investigating our own models of what it is to be mentally healthy. Where do we draw the line between sanity and insanity, and who exactly is doing so?
Sometimes stepping off the path is the path; sometimes going astray homes us. Sometimes the worse I feel, the healthier I feel. For example, in feeling lousy and in uncritically giving myself permission to simply feel lousy, without trying to fix, rise above, or outthink it, I’m not at war with myself, nor trying to be somewhere else, somewhere “better” or more “spiritual.” My “darker” feelings, deliberately accepted and given a sufficient infusion of wakeful attention, bring me more vividly and multidimensionally present. Sometimes all craziness needs is a bigger pasture, not higher fences.
The darker, crazier, stranger, and unwanted aspects of us ask not for rehabilitation, nor for ostracization or colonization, nor for romanticizing or facile acceptance, but for space to breathe and stretch and be seen and heard. If we deny them their own authentic voice in the community of “I’s” that make us up, we only impoverish ourselves, leaving ourselves partial, fragmented, segregated, busy supporting an apartheid of psyche.
The madness that would gag and eviscerate madness -- and automatically equate it with illness -- needs to be stripped of its authority. Sure, strong intervention may be called for at times, as when violent or suicidal behavior arises, but even then there is no valid reason for not paying close, careful attention to what the madness is saying, or is trying to say.
And it is not only psychiatry and conventional, soul-barren psychology that’s at fault here: Consider humanistically-oriented psychology’s tendency to make “light” of our darker, more insidious aspects: Its excessive focus on “positive” values -- most exaggeratedly illustrated in the terminally nice aspirations of the New Age movement (which sprang from a mix of humanistic psychology, occultism, and ascent-oriented religious practices in the early 1970s) -- have kept it relatively shallow and innocuous, all but cut off from its own existential underground. A saner approach to mental illness has arisen in the past three decades through an auspicious overlapping and meeting of psychology and spirituality, as well as through a deepening appreciation of indigenous cultures’ shamanic wisdom relative to madness. Even psychiatry, albeit only very slightly, is reconsidering its negative view of religion, particularly in the context of evaluating so-called mental disorders.
What analytic, cognitive-behavioral, humanistic, and transpersonal psychologies tend to view as hindrances to well-being -- depression, anger, anxiety, jealousy, despair, and, especially, apparent craziness -- a deeper (and necessarily integral) psychology views as potential steppingstones to a truer life. There is a madness that can heal, particularly if it is infused with compassionate, genuinely interested attention, as numerous accounts of spiritual crises attest.
To significantly access such attention, one cannot simply remain in a prerational (New Age), pseudo-rational (“regular” psychiatry), rational (Szasz), or otherwise egoically-based perspective. Instead, a transrational -- and therefore significantly transegoic -- perspective must be cultivated. This, of course, has its own dangers, its own unique pathologies, like transpersonal grandstanding and making spiritual real estate out of moments of light, but it can nonetheless provide sufficient illumination for the investigation of “I,” including the “I” that wants to be free of ego.
So the work is to keep ego in perspective. Not its perspective, but the perspective of Being, or the ever-natural standpoint of unfabricated awareness. Such a perspective is not an intellectual position nor something that can be activated by only believing in it -- it must be practiced, developed, permitted, honored, reentered, again and again and again allowed to unambiguously dethrone our diseased subjectivity, leaving us with no allegiance to any particular “I’s” agenda. Through this perspective, psychopathology can -- through not taking its naming and categorizing so literally -- actually enrich and deepen mental health. Naming and then, at the right time, facing and encountering our dragons brings us closer to the treasure that they are guarding (and must guard, until we have demonstrated that we are ready to make wise use of it).
When we realize right to our core that nothing whatsoever -- however much it might be shunned or condemned socially -- needs to be turned away from in order that we might awaken (or reawaken), then we are, however briefly, dwelling at the threshold of a freedom beyond imagining, a freedom that is not limited by its chains.
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February 19 , 2007
BREAKING THE GRIP OF PERFECTIONISM
Nothing haunts like perfectionism.
And perfectionism is not about to give up the ghost without potent intervention, which begins with seeing perfectionism through eyes other than its own.
The addiction to perfection that pollutes much of contemporary culture is perhaps most eloquently and disturbingly illustrated through the hypernegative body-imaging and anorexic behavior that possesses so many girls and young women. A flat tummy, envied by many, is not good enough for the woman hooked on somatic idealism; her tummy has to be a more concave shade of flat, and has to be closely monitored to make sure that no trace of fat somehow infiltrates her waistline. She may have a flatter-than-flat belly, and still suck it in, as if leaning toward invisibility -- she both aches to be seen as immaculate beauty incarnate, and aches to disappear, knowing that she cannot ever really measure up.
No reassurances from others of how beautiful she is can make any real difference, for she has already convinced herself that she is not, and cannot be, beautiful. Perfectionism has her under its thumb, and doesn’t give a damn about her screams and suicidal urges. She is always in perfectionism’s cold mirror, having not yet learned to hold up a mirror to her perfectionism itself.
But once she does, she is on her way out of her hell. All she has to do is keep that mirror in place, and to name her perfectionism when it arises. She might call it something a touch simpler, like her “inner critic” -- but whatever she names it, the point is to make sure that she names it (so that it ceases referring to itself as her, or as her higher self, her conscience, and so on). Once she has established some distance from it -- through naming it and working on its underlying dynamics -- she can then start developing a relationship with it. As she does so, the constituent elements of her perfectionism will become more obvious; for example, she might recognize in its voice a certain tone that her parents used when they were, however inadvertently, shaming her.
To work skillfully with our perfectionism is to work with our shame. Shame is not always easy to recognize, for it often quickly mutates into other states, like withdrawal or aggression. When shame and fear hook up, guilt results, and guilt is perhaps the state most deeply employed in keeping us stuck. Guilt keeps perfectionism in business, by splitting us into a “bad” child and an overseeing, unforgivingly critical parent. To move beyond this, we need to recognize within ourselves -- and more than just intellectually -- both the childish and the parental sides of guilt, and identify with neither, being instead the space, the wakefully compassionate space, in which they arise. Not so easy to do, but do it we must, if we are to graduate from guilt’s stalemated domain and the toxic perfectionism that supplies both its whips and the excuses that justify the whipping of the “bad” side of guilt by the “good” side.
Just like guilt, the Freudian superego — our inner supercritic — may successfully masquerade as conscience, but it is too much of a nagging parent, compulsive faultfinder, and perfectionist to assume the position of conscience with any real authority. The superego — which, like ego, is actually not an entity, but rather an activity or process — is devoid of compassion, whereas conscience is inherently compassionate.
As was suggested above, it is useful to identify the indwelling voices pretending to be our conscience. If a particular voice speaks cruelly or overcritically to us, we’d likely do best to direct its contents to our trash bin. This means, among other things, that we must learn to relate to our minds, emotions, and perceptions, rather than just from them. To this end, non-dissociative meditative practice is essential. When we clear away the rubble — through working in-depth with our physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual dimensions — we find our conscience intact and clear. A diamond in the debris.
Keeping an eye on our inner critic not only helps prevent it from playing “I,” but also allows us to mine it for any gems that it might contain, like intuitions or insights that we might not otherwise be able to access. But to thus mine it, we need to keep the lights on, so that we can see where we are going.
Our inner critic, especially in its perfectionistic mode, can easily tyrannize us, keeping us a captive audience to its views and certainties. Like young children who don’t question what their parents are doing, even when it’s abusive, we usually don’t question what our inner critic is doing. It plays parent, and we play child, and the play that follows is often far from playful or kind. Our inner critic finds fault with us, and if it can’t, lets us know that we had better maintain our lofty standard, or else -- which, of course, generates enough pressure to ensure that we will, sooner than later, slip. Our inner critic insists that what it is doing is for our own good, as it immerses us in should after should. So much to should-er...
The inner critic’s grail is perfection, not just momentary excellence, but ongoing ultra-excellence, 100 percent grades, etcetera. It degrades us for not making the grade. We may act as if we are victims of it, but we are not; it only exists as it is because of the unwitting attention we have learned to give it. Even when we have seen it for what it is, we may get critical of it, perhaps thinking that now we have the upper hand, but all we’ve really done is given our inner critic new clothes and a “higher” seat in our headquarters. Freedom from our inner critic does not mean an end to being judgmental -- for being judgmental comes with having a mind -- but rather a relocation of judgmentalness to a place in us where heart and wakefulness coexist.
Once we learn to relate to our inner critic rather than from it (that is, speaking to it rather than as it), we can become intimate with it, knowing it from the deep inside, so that when it arises, we recognize it almost immediately (through changes in our feeling tone, posture, bodily tension, and so on). Through such recognition, we are not at its mercy, but instead can choose how to deal with it. We may withdraw our attention from it -- thereby reducing its ordinarily authoritative voice to less than an echo -- or we may explore it, checking out its anatomical peculiarities, sifting through its predictabilities for nuggets of insight.
In the beginning stages of dealing with our inner critic, we may entertain the fantasy of getting rid of it (which is akin to the egoic longing to eradicate ego, a favorite pursuit of more than a few spiritual paths), but later, as we realize that we just ain’t going to get rid of it, we start to change our relationship to it. Eventually, we reach such intimacy with our inner critic that we have no concern about its presence, any more than the sky is concerned about its clouds. And then we recognize, right to our marrow, the perfectly imperfect way in which our life, like all lives, is unfolding.
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February 22 , 2007
For me to trust you means that I, having consistently witnessed your integrity and reliability, have an abiding confidence that you will continue to manifest such qualities. Trust as such is not an a priori stance, but a result. Blind trust is not trust, but rather a cocktail of foolhardiness and hope.
The deeper our mutual trust, the deeper our relationship can go, so long as that trust is rooted not in naiveté, but in a mutuality that’s anchored in transparency, integrity (or embodied incorruptibility), and love. Trust should not be automatically given; it must be earned.
In the beginning, we may be enamored by another’s better qualities, and want to give that one our trust -- especially if there’s an intoxicatingly romantic infusion of lust -- but we’d do best to withhold giving our full trust until enough time has passed to see the other in action in a variety of circumstances. If our bullshit detector is turned down to too low a volume (perhaps because we don’t want our romantic trance interrupted), we will probably get sloppy in giving our trust, selling it for a few baubles of feel-good attention.
Seeing how our partner operates when things get rough provides a clear indicator of their trustworthiness. Are they worthy of our trust? We need to find this out, rather than just believing it from the start, out of some romantic notion that we should thus believe.
Without a strongly anchored mutual trust, intimate relationship remains stranded in the shallows, regardless of its excursions to deeper territory. When I ask most couples if they trust each other, there is usually some hesitation before they say yes -- that is, if they even say yes. A hesitant yes is not a full yes; we may be saying yes because we want to trust our partner, or think that we should. But a yes that is animated by any form of “should” is not a full yes.
Part of building trust is an honest, in-depth sharing of how we have been less than trustworthy in our past. This is not about shaming ourselves for old transgressions and stupidities, but rather about sharing what’s happened openly, vulnerably, and in the spirit of establishing a healthy foundation with our partner. No secrets. This can be a painful process, but it is necessary. Not every detail is needed, but enough need to be provided so as to give a sufficiently clear picture and sense of what happened.
As we do this, it is important that we uncover -- perhaps with our partner’s assistance -- the prevailing patterns underlying our past behavior. Some of these patterns may truly be things of the past, but others may still be very much present, however much they may be under wraps. These must be revealed, so that they can be worked with -- this is not about shaming each other, but rather is about not keeping anything from each other. Doing so is an act of trust, deep trust.
Another part of building trust is to openly share our mistrust. We may be tempted to act as if we trust our partner with something or someone, but if we don’t, to whatever degree, we need to share that. To thus share our mistrust is actually an act of trust. If we are on the receiving end of this, we need to stay as open as possible; if we get reactive, and put down our partner for daring to mistrust us, they will be less likely to want to share their mistrust in the future.
Without mutual trust, there will not be enough safety in the relationship to go truly deep. For example, a couple may, regardless of their love for each other, get sloppy when anger arises -- becoming hostile, sarcastic, passive aggressive, blaming, and so on -- thereby becoming less than a safe space for each other; they may still open to each other to quite a depth, but it will only go so far, simply because there’s not enough safety, or well-rooted trust, to go further.
We don’t want to be at a relational edge, and not know if our partner will hold the line secure. This is why it is crucial to identify any cracks in the container of the relationship. Even occasional sarcasm can generate such cracks, however thin or slight. Aggression cracks the container, as does contempt and a lack of integrity. Infidelity all but destroys the container, as does violence. A mature couple is deeply committed to keeping their relational container free of cracks. The container can be transparent, permeable, infinitely expansive, but it is still a container, a protected space wherein freedom is found not through escaping the container, but rather through treating it as a sanctuary of love, awakening, and transformation.
If I am untrustworthy in certain areas, don’t override your concerns just because I am so wonderful in other ways; don’t let my good points obscure or marginalize my not-so-good points. Relate to me as I am, rather than having a relationship with my trustworthiness potential.
The better the relationship, the deeper the trust, and vice versa. When I trust you fully, I can open with you until I am but sentient openness. When I trust you fully, then our relationship becomes a crucible for healing and awakening, so that no matter what arises, it is workable. When I trust you fully, I become more alive, more fleshed-out, more conscious, more brave, more curious and caring, letting our relationship carry me beyond what I have taken myself to be.
When we are truly connected, even the arising of disconnection is okay. In fact, trusting each other with our disconnectedness only deepens our mutual trust. The deepest trust of all is but lucid surrender to reality in the raw, at once rooted in and generating a sublimely solid faith, a faith that holds steady in even the stormiest relational times.
When it’s time to trust, do so, even if you’re afraid to do so. Better at such times to have trusted and gotten hurt, than not to have trusted.
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February 27, 2007
Just finished a remarkable group, in which every participant not only did very deep work, but took -- however unwillingly at first! -- such work even further, right to the edge of their edge, not some easy-to-cross boundary of self (as is commonly traversed in meditative practice), but a territory that, when inhabited, shakes us to our core.
If it’s easy, it’s not our edge. If it’s not one hell of a challenge, it’s not our edge. If it doesn’t shake, quake, or break us, it’s not our edge. If it’s easily witnessed, it’s not our edge. If it doesn’t bring up huge resistance in us, resistance that tosses aside therapeutic jackhammers like toothpicks in a hurricane, it’s not our edge. If we think we’re doing shadow-work while we sit intact, it’s not our edge.
When each person went to their edge -- and this was not planned! -- it was usually shortly after they’d seemingly completed some deep work. It was as if the resulting openness made room for, or allowed, the surfacing of even more relevant material. More often than not, it came as a surprise, frequently (and sometimes humorously) following an apparently innocuous or offhand comment from someone else in the group. This was supposed to be a training intensive for a group that had completed a one-year practicum in Integral Psychotherapy with me last year. But the personal, at-the-edge work that emerged took clear precedence, so that we only did a bit of training in the last third or so of the group.
And it wasn’t only the openness of the just-done work that brought forth the at-the-edge work. It was also the dynamically present and abiding love the participants had for each other, a love honed and deepened through a year of unusually rich work and personal connections. In the presence of such well-seasoned love, there was far more challenge than happens in regular groupwork.
Sometime the challenge was quite fierce, but nonetheless had none of the pushy, ambitiously aggressive characteristics of the encounter groups from three or four decades ago. There was plenty of anger, but it was mostly heart-anger. Even in the heat of tense exchanges, agreement and disagreement were kept peripheral to feeling what was being communicated. Resistance was not made wrong, but was allowed to energetically cut loose, without, however, any bowing down to or facile acceptance of its viewpoint.
The edge is where growth happens. It’s also where contexts suddenly shift, personal universes disintegrate, and evolutionary imperatives suddenly seize the foreground. And, perhaps most of all, it’s the frontier of the known. Most avoid the edge, some flirt with it, and some, whether foolhardy or spiritually ambitious, step off it too soon, but few develop any intimacy with it.
But intimacy with the edge is essential if we are to be our true size; we must find some real footing in it, some sense of ground, if we are to truly take flight from it. Why slip off it, when we can use it as a springboard? This is metaphor, and it is also much more. What lies beyond the edge is never other than right here, whenever we peel back our fear. Some say to look before you leap, and others say to look after you leap, but why not look as you leap?
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