Pain for the World

In April, I attended a retreat at Spirit Rock Meditation Center on Transforming Distressing States. Joanna Macy was one of the teachers, and is an amazing feminist Buddhist ecophilosopher, who wrote World as Lover, World as Self.

One of the most profound shifts for me on this retreat was Joanna’s revelation about the pain we feel for the world that we totally repress. BP’s oil spill destroying the Gulf, thousands (or millions) of people dying in multiple never-ending wars, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict about to blow, Arizona getting more racist by the minute, and whatever else is going on that I don’t know about because I can’t even stand to read the news. Every new piece of information is like a blow that hits and retraumatizes that wounded, vulnerable part of me – it’s a wonder I can even get out of bed.

Because we believe that we have a separate individual self, we feel the pain for the world and assume it’s all OUR pain. Our individualistic culture tells us to do this, and look how much it helps keep us from fighting the larger corporate and political powers that are creating all this pain. While psychotherapy is generally awesome, it can contribute to this as well – when we talk about our terror over how the land and water is being raped and pillaged by masculine corporate interests, our therapist redirects us to talk about our “real” terror of our own bodies being raped and pillaged. As if there’s no “real” terror to be had over the destruction of our environment.

I’m certainly not minimizing or denying the reality of the pain and terror of our own bodies being brutally violated. But what if they BOTH get to be real? That when the pain & terror comes up, we can name it as about BOTH our own violation and the violation of our world? What if we flipped the therapist’s script, and when our trauma came up, we honored it AND asked “What other trauma is going on in the world that feels like this same pattern of individual trauma that shows up in my life?” And then we honored that too. For me it’s nearly impossible for me to tease out how much is mine vs. how much is the world’s … because it’s really all the same trauma at some level. My trauma ripples out and diminishes the rest of the world, and the world’s trauma ripples out and diminishes my ability to live.

I’ve found it immensely helpful to understand why I’m feeling overwhelmed, triggered, and ready to just shut down – there’s a lot of shit going down and it IS overwhelming and triggering to my system. A little Breathing Through practice is in order – just breathe it all in, and breathe it all back out. No need to transform it, and certainly no need to hang on to it. Open to let it in, and breathe it right back out.

Off the Typical Yoga Trajectory

I went to a new yoga class this Sunday. Near the end of the class, we held the position of Downward-Facing Dog for 5 full minutes. For non-yogis, in Downward-Facing Dog you have your hands and feet on the ground, tail high in the air. Your body makes two sides of a triangle, with the floor being the third side.

Instructions on Downward-Facing Dog, from Yoga Journal

The teacher gave instructions for holding this length of pose, similar instructions that I’ve heard from other yoga and meditation teachers. “Often in life, we don’t push ourselves. We would rather be a little lazy or take the easy route. Use the length of this pose to challenge yourself, to push yourself beyond your comfort zone.”

As we entered the pose, I thought to myself, “What if I’m the type of person who never takes the easy route? The person who is always pushing myself to work harder & longer, who skips lunch and drinks with friends so I can get more done?”

As my head hung down between my arms, I felt in my body the truth that no matter what the instructor said, I needed to apply the pose to my own needs. I don’t need to learn how to push myself harder. Instead I need to learn to relax, to listen to the subtle indications from my body that it’s time for a break, and to actually take that break so my body knows fully that I’m listening.

Three minutes in, I lowered to my hands and knees and rested comfortably. Instead of feeling guilty, I savored the experience of learning just what I needed to learn.

Edit

There’s a way that I lose my writing voice when I start to edit. It’s worst when I try to edit while writing, try to overthink my audience, what they want, what they will think about whatever is going on in my head. When I try to write “a blog post” and be all official about it, it just gets bland.

Monday morning at 4:20 AM, I remembered that I write best when it comes out stream-of-consciousness. When I don’t worry too much whether the uninitiated reader has all the background necessary to understand what’s going on. I woke up that early, thinking about my friend Kate’s newest book The Book of John (check out the excerpt). “New” as in “not actually out until May 2010, but I’ve got the freaking Microsoft Word version because I’m just that cool.” I started reading the book Sunday night, and forced myself to go to bed because I had to work early on Monday morning. But damn Kate and her damn books, they get under your skin, they whisper into your dreams. They have some secret way to tell your cat that there’s more important things to be doing than sleeping, and they hypnotize your cat into meowing in your face, pawing your shoulder until you are wide awake and thinking about how heartbreaking this book is.

So I surrendered to the power of Kate’s book, and got up and wrote her a stream of consciousness review. And even now I can’t imagine publishing it direct to this blog without editing the fuck out of it. And since “the fuck” is the juicy part, if I edit the fuck out of it, there’s really not much left. So I’m writing this review of my review, trying out my looser voice, the voice I use freely in emails to friends, but still haven’t quite found a way to publish it to the interwebs. Kate is beyond an inspiration to find my own voice, speak my own truth, own my vulnerability as the most precious of the crown jewels.