Red Cedar
More apocalypse, less angst
Post 3048: Learning how to talk to myself
Recently, my partner asked me to stop being so hard on myself as in — “please work on this, it’s not helpful”…. and so now I am in a state of noticing. Noticing all the times I stop myself, second guess my responses, think mean things about myself in the back of my head. Let me tell you, this noticing is annoying. Really annoying.
For example, just the other day, my fellow blogger over at Small, Delicious Life, posted a partial article he is working on and then went on Facebook to solicit feedback on the thoughts therein. First of all, I was flattered – because isn’t it nice that someone thinks I’m smart enough to comment on their smart ideas? And then I decided that responding was just going to get me in trouble because all those other smart friends he tagged were sure to be smarter than me. But of course, I can’t help myself – because I have thoughts! And so I quickly drafted up some of them, deleting them twice before finally posting them (and removing a link back to an article on my own blog in the process) – and of course qualifying all of them by saying that they were “not cogent” and “draft” just to underscore how much I don’t think my ideas matter very much.
Right, so you get the point. That is fucking exhausting. And it’s pretty much how I live a great deal of my life. If I go for a jog (as I did the other day for the first time in ages) I spend most of it internally commenting on my out of shape, middle-age body. In work meetings where I am the subject matter expert, I find myself constantly apologizing for having an opinion even though I am one of probably about two people who have my specific expertise in all of North America (and my opinion is more than welcome). I am critical of myself every time I purchase something to the degree that I have (at least once) had a breakdown over the purchase of a new pair of shoes. And then there is the fact that I pretty much avoid looking in the mirror as much as is possible without becoming slovenly because I have *never* learned to like the way I look (fat or thin).
And it’s not like any of that changes my approach to things or betters me in any way – my internal anxiety about buying things (for example) does not make me more green than other people, just more miserable about spending money.
Here’s the thing. I know I am smart. I know I am not lazy. I know I am actually very good at what I do professionally, and that I have the capacity to write and make music as well as anyone – and yet I go out in the world pretending that I do not think any of those things. And worse than that, I tell myself that I do not think any of these things even when I am busy demonstrating to people how much I can do so well (make money, knit scarves, bake bread, run significant projects on behalf of the federal government, pickle beets, represent as a union advocate, sew garments, make love, play the ukulele, write personal essays on this blog, put on fabulous parties, etc. etc.)
There’s a part of me that wants to hate on myself for this one more thing thing – this internal critic – but I’m pretty sure this is mostly not my fault. For when you are good at things, when you are opinionated, a little bit loud, and possibly even show some leadership capacity *and also a woman* – there is a whole world out there ready to put you in your place from childhood on up to middle age. There are younger men who will get jobs you are 10 x more qualified for. There are women who will pull you aside when you are a young union leader and tell you that you are arrogant (or – heaven forbid – they will just whisper that you are a lesbian) just because you stand up and know what you are talking about. There are all the people (especially family) who will diminish your accomplishments because you don’t have children (and that’s what really makes a woman, right?) Or if you do have kids, you will constantly be criticized for how you raise them, 10 million times more than their fathers will ever be. (If you are a stepmother, for the record, it will be assumed you are a homewrecker with no familiar relationship to your step-child).
Most of all, you will have to develop a million deflection strategies so that no one feels threatened or diminished by your competence – and that’s where the bad habits (of self-deprecation, internal criticism and so on) set in.
The other day, I read this celebrity does a triathalon article in which America Ferrera relates her own battle with internalized negativity and how she confronted that while training for an athletic event she didn’t ever think she would do. This piece isn’t unique, because this is such a common part of the female landscape, but it landed with me at a time that I was already thinking about this self-destructive defense tactic and how much it makes me unavailable to enjoy my own experiences and successes. Her strategy for combating the voice is really just the cognitive behavioural trick of replacing negative thoughts with positive ones – enough so that those become the habit of self-reference – and it’s pretty much the only thing I can imagine would work. External validation has nothing to do with it – obviously – you can have heaps of that and still hate yourself. It really is about deciding that we don’t have to be “sorry” for being who we are.
Now, I want to qualify – this doesn’t only apply to women. Tons of people suffer from these same ingrained responses due to class, gender, race, and other social status situations – it comes up all the time in people around me who have vastly different experiences of the world than me….. But the fix is probably the same for the most part. We have to start with taming that internal voice. We have to take our rightful place at the tables where we belong and not take the external criticism of the world in. And once we can do that, then we are far more equipped to dismantle those external barriers and start building a society that doesn’t tell so many of us that we are inferior all of the time.
So 2017 is going to be a year where I work on that. It didn’t really show up in my year compass as a big focus, but in the last few weeks it’s been on my mind.
I started practicing yesterday when I was in Vancouver for meetings. A co-worker stopped me in the hall and told me that she thought I would be a good president of our union local (the election is only a month away). Instead of qualifying my response or trying to be funny about it – I simply said “Thanks – I think I will be a good local president – I’m the most qualified person to take it on right now.” It is the truth, and it felt pretty awesome to say it out loud.
Post #3047: A pitch for self-planning
This morning I’ve switched the dial on Google play from my regular – moody and mellow – music channels to something called “Handclapping & Footstomping”. After three nights in a row where my sleep wasn’t the best, I need something to pep me up a bit and this seems to be doing it. I’m counting down until work holidays which start for me next Thursday – not because I’m that interested in the Christmas season, but because I’m at the point in the year where I’m pretty disinterested in work. Bottomline – it’s break time and I need a few sleeping in days. I’ll have twelve of those between the 22nd and the 3rd and I can hardly wait – especially since Brian and I are now on island(s) together until the new year. There’s been a lot of time alone on the dark island recently, owing to weird work schedules on both our parts, and I’m ready for some steady company now.
As we near the end of December, I find myself marveling at the fact that a year ago this month – we still had no idea that we were moving town and house. It was a decision that didn’t come until the end of February- and yet it seems like years since we set our sights on this island. I suppose that’s because we have planned for somewhere rural ever since we first met nine years ago – and we were just waiting for the right time and place to occur to us. The fundamentals of change are like that, aren’t they? You float along thinking about things for a long time and then suddenly the opportunity appears and the change seems to happen overnight. It’s a bit like how my (amazing) yoga teacher moves us slowly, slowly into position, and then with a quick snap at the end we are into the final twist/bend/contortion….. I call it sneaky teaching because you don’t know where you are going as you inch along, you aren’t convinced you are ever going to get anywhere, and then suddenly! You are in a totally new-to-you place!
Which really just suggests that so much of what gets us ready to do anything is happening on a semi or subconscious level – which is something worth remembering when we feel stuck in a rut and like we aren’t doing enough to change that. Of course, there are times when action is obvious and necessary – but sometimes all we can do is have an idea about where we are going, and otherwise wait until we get there, or until circumstances around us change to provide an opening (that we have mentally prepared ourselves to slip through).
Last year at this time I did the Year Compass and although I don’t have a copy of it now (their online tool has disappeared), I know that my key words for 2016 were Move, Mobilize, Motivate – because our routine in the city had become a bit stultifying and I was ready for something new to happen. By the time I chose those keywords, I was clearly already one foot out of the city (and was also planning to purchase a decent bicycle), but I had no idea that we would so decisively jump that hurdle less than twelve weeks later by putting our house on the market.
Which is why I’m a convert to doing an annual planning/visioning process for myself. Even when we don’t know what we are planning for – revisiting feelings, values, and how we spend our time – in some kind of structured way, helps us nail down the essence of who we are and what we deeply want/need (as opposed to what we think we want or need). It’s basically like arming ourselves for change – so that when it comes knocking at your door, or when you need to manifest something new – you have the basis on which to make decisions already sitting in your subconscious and ready to help answer the question that will arise. Don’t get me wrong, when I am deeply in a rut, I see the appeal of change for the sake of change – but given that none of us have that much extra energy to spare, it seems like a bit of future planning can help us move consistent with our values and our life path, as opposed to zig-zagging from one road to the next.
Although I haven’t finished my compass document yet, I think this year is going to be less focused on movement, and more on contemplative community and practice. That’s the deep need I’m feeling after three restless nights and a recently erratic schedule – but I’ll have to wait and see what comes up when I start digging in and looking at myself for another year forward.
Post 3046: My looming problem (resolved)
Moving away from the topic of zen for a moment (or not, because what is weaving if not a zen practice?) – I have an announcement to make:
I am finally in possession of a working, functionally set-up loom.
Remember awhile back when I wrote about buying a second small-ish loom because the first big one I bought was overwhelming and needed some work? Well, I did get it mostly put together right away after it arrived via courier – even getting the tie-ups partly completed – but then I was stumped. For some reason, the treadling (the foot pedals) were clunky and not snapping into place – and I had a feeling that it had something to do with the elastic cord which had been removed in the transit process – but I could not figure out how the whole thing was supposed to tie together. I wrote to the company asking for the original instructions, which came, sans any mention of the elastic cord. I now realize that the elastic cord only applied to some of their treadling kits, but not all and the instructions I got were fairly generic. Then I went online and looked around to see if that helped – but there are so few of these looms out there (or if they are, they are packed away in people’s garages) that I couldn’t find much, and what I did find didn’t really explain things. So, being really busy this fall, I walked away from it for a few months.
Flash forward to last week when I got the bug to weave again and started thinking about my loom. I had bought replacement elastic cord and some additional heddles (the eyes that the thread or yarn passes through to form the pattern) which were waiting for me to install – and so I found a bit of time here and there over a few days to get to work on it. And what of the elastic cord? Once I got underneath the loom I could see that there were pulleys built in especially to create a track for that cordage which simply holds the lamms to the frame so they snap back in place after the treadle is released (don’t worry if you didn’t understand that sentence, weaving has its own dictionary).
All that to say – I figured it out and got the loom tied up a couple of days ago. Last night, I put together the warping board that I bought back in May – which took all of about 10 minutes – and I proceeded to put a tiny warp on my loom (the warp are the fibres that pass from the front to back of the loom, they are lifted in various combinations using foot pedals or levers to create the weave pattern).
If you look at the picture below, you can see that the warp pattern is off a bit, but no matter – I had two goals in mind when I put this on. First, I wanted to see how the loom was in operation and whether I had configured it all correctly. So far the answer to that is yes – but it needs some adjusting and the heddles that were originally on it are a bit tangled – and I definitely need to get or build a weaving bench that is a bit higher than my kitchen chair to use it comfortably. Second, I wanted to follow the steps of warping a loom without a lot of ends to manage – which went fine – but I do need to mount the warping board on the wall to curtail the back pain that goes with being uncomfortably stooped when winding meters and meters of yarn into a warp.
Once all that was sorted out, I got to weave for a bit before bedtime – the inset photo shows the results – three weave patterns (a plainweave and 2 twills) for the pure purpose of getting my head back into reading a draft and watching the pattern emerge in the fabric. This is my first time using a loom with foot pedals, and I used the Peggy Osterkamp 4-treadle tie up which is amazingly efficient and doesn’t require retying for every pattern. I’ve got a couple meters of warp on, so I plan to weave it off trying out a variety of weave sequences before putting on a wider warp and doing something a bit more planned. I think that might be a scarf, followed up by some fabric to be turned into napkins. We’ll see. But for now I’m going to enjoy the aimless weaving as I get used to this little loom.
I’m feeling so confident at the moment, that I may even get the big loom into action soon too!
(Like how I used your pun Carmen?)
Post 3045: Opening the windows
In my meditation retreat a couple of weeks ago, one of my teachers said, “sometimes we figure out what our retreat is about after a few days of it, but often we don’t know what a retreat is about for us was about until afterwards”. After five residential retreats (not many, but enough for a sample), I know that this process of discovery happens in layers – a bit of understanding in the retreat, quite a lot more in the week that follows, and then more later, perhaps on the next retreat when something comes round full circle again.
I cried a lot during my sesshin at Loon Lake this year. I wasn’t expecting that at all, but I discovered in my first two days of sitting that all of my body was noise and it wouldn’t simply dial down. Noise about the US election, climate change, the turn towards hatred, the outrage and rawness and exhaustion I was feeling from all the months of yelling yelling yelling. It was all in there, and when I started to get silent, it came up and danced in front of me. And so I went to my meetings with teachers and cried, I cried on my cushion during the Dharma talks, I cried in my bed when a particularly crushing childhood memory came back to me in a jolt. It was in no way continual, but it was the punctuation to each day of the retreat. It was confusing, because I am not a crier, but I became curious about what would make me cry next.
On the last day of sitting, I heard someone across the room sniffle. At first I thought “damn, someone’s got a cold” because if one person has a cold at retreat then it means there’s a good chance other people will get it and take it home with them. It’s not the most compassionate response, but I have become an ardent hand washer at communal gatherings because I *always* get sick otherwise. Anyhow – my ears were perked up to just such a sign in the zendo….. At first one sniffle, then two…. and after a few more seconds I realized that I was listening to someone cry, not have a cold…. and even more, in that room of 70 people, I could identify who it was. The moment I made that identification, it was like a channel opened up, and I began to cry also, but not for any specific reason of my own but because I could feel the clear suffering of my fellow sitter pouring right inside of me as though it were my very own.
After leaving retreat, I went to visit my family and then drove home to Gabriola. Over the week following (much of which I was separate from Brian due to differing work commitments – and so had lots of self reflection time) I noted that I was feeling a lot of my interactions with people holistically, through my whole body and touching my deeply in the way they normally don’t. I’ve been writing more since that time, I’ve been reading more zen, I’ve been more open generally with my time, and feeling more honest and generous overall, even as the implications of being open are also to feel more pain – to feel the injury of others continuously. This opening was authentic, not the result of thinking I should do one thing or behave some way, just a natural transition from the cushion to everyday life. It’s been remarkable to note it, even as I also feel that flow begin to ebb.
I have had such experiences before – following retreats or periods of intensive daily meditation. I have had great washes of universal love, or radical truth-telling, or changes of my relationship to time – as a result of this practice. Thus far these have been momentary, a few hours, a day at most. This time was a bit different – an opening in full form for at least a week, and still somewhat with me as I write this entry. But I know it won’t last – this state, like all things, is impermanent.
When we meditate, we watch our feelings rise and fall, pass before us and slip out the door. We learn that our emotional states are literally seconds or nano-seconds long, that even if we are having a really deep meditation in one moment, the monkey mind can start throwing bananas in the next, and that the breath is a tenuous anchor at the best of times. In our work towards living in the world more fully, there is no linear path, and no constancy in our responses to the stimulus around us. But what keeps us, or at least me, coming back to sit over and over no matter how tedious it seems at times – is these glimpses of equanimity, these cracks in which the shining self waiting to be revealed leaks through.
I do not have a cosmic relationship with the notion of awakening or enlightenment. As I’ve written before, I believe these are purely psychological states that come with deepening our relationship and understanding – and so I ascribe nothing mystical to these openings of feeling or awareness that come following a retreat. I do believe, however, that they are the guideposts to where we seek to go in the fullness of ourselves, and in the right time.
I will note that after a week and a half of this window open to compassion and connection, I have spent the last 24 hours in an outrageously angry state. I had a political argument today on Facebook (about Castro, of all things), I yelled at Brian last night because he wasn’t *as* pissed off at the government as I am about electoral reform. Basically, I am picking fights for no reason.
I believe this anger is intrisically connected to the channel that was opened in me following retreat. And so I continue to discover what fruit that period of silent meditation will bring to bear.
I came across this quote yesterday and it resonates – so rather than coming up with a pithy ending to this post, I will leave it here for your consideration. It’s a deep commitment required of each of us.
Many of us have set out on the path of enlightenment. We long for a release of selfhood in some kind of mystical union with all things. But that moment of epiphany–when we finally see the whole pattern and sense our place in the cosmic web–can be a crushing experience from which we never fully recover.
Compassion hurts. When you feel connected to everything, you also feel responsible for everything. You can not turn away. Your destiny is bound to the destinies of others. You must either learn to carry the Universe or be crushed by it. You must grow strong enough to love the world, yet empty enough to sit down at the same table with its worst horrors.
To seek enlightenment is to seek annihilation, rebirth, and the taking up of burdens. You must come prepared to touch and be touched by each and every thing in heaven and hell.
Andrew Boyd
Post 3044: Light time, night time
I don’t feel like working today. So much so, that I briefly considered calling in sick, even though I work from my home studio on Mondays and arriving here is as simple as getting out of bed and crossing the driveway. I’m not really sick at the moment though, I’m just fuzzy and I would like more sleep, so I kicked myself out from under the covers and here I sit, watching the light rise around me. From my desk at home I have a clear view to the ocean, enough so that I can tell whether it’s a calm day out there or a choppy one, enough so that I can see the colour of the sunrise as it spreads across the sea.
Over the weekend it became apparent that with the summer foliage gone, we can glimpse the ocean from pretty much every room in our house during the wintertime. We can stand on our deck in the night and see the ferries sail by, lights blazing – and the cold air of winter carries the dark water in it.
When I moved here, a friend (who was about to get a divorce but didn’t know it yet), told me that the worst thing about living on Gabriola was the darkness of winter here. There are no street lights, and houses are set back from the road and surrounded by trees. The power goes off on the regular (it went out last night for two hours) due to windstorms and aging hydro infrastructure, and the coast is always cloudy in the wintertime. She moved off the island a month after I moved onto it, and I wondered then how much the darkness would affect me. Even in Gibsons, there was quite a bit of ambient light both from the town and from the city of Vancouver – which is not the case on our side of the island – it gets really dark here.
Thus far, all I can report is that I sleep more deeply, that a wool blanket has never been more welcome in my life, and that stocking the wood for the stove during daylight is essential if you don’t want to be scared by a raccoon in the woodshed at night. Granted, this is our first winter here, perhaps I will grow to dislike all these things immensely. Maybe the awareness of light or its absence will prove to be too much, and I’ll long for the city again. I’m counting on that not being the case, but it could be.
Yesterday I went to a place called the Net Loft for a meditation gathering that happens every Sunday. An incredible spot, with windows to the ocean in a perfect and protected bay – I entered, bowed before the altar before sitting, and for an hour my knees touched the floor in the silence of becoming. It is true that the nights here are very dark, but the light from the water is always buoyant.
Red Cedar 