Focused, present relat­ing takes practice.

When I wrote my last book, I sent it out for review and com­ment. One of my friends, David Sheedy, e-mailed me with the idea of talk­ing about what I am “in,” as com­pared to what I have “learned.” In other words, to talk about the process of deal­ing with what, for me, might not be working.

I’m think­ing of this and also of a recent week­end. Actu­ally, I’m think­ing about Sun­days, and how I often have mini-meltdowns on Sun­days. I blame this on get­ting kicked out of the church back in 1996, and at the same time am aware that I make me miserable.

I won’t belabour any of this, as I think the over­all process is what is impor­tant to me. I notice that my process, over the years, has not shifted much at all. In other words, I tor­ture myself in famil­iar ways—this is one of those slip­pery insights we are always talk­ing about. The piece that is most impor­tant is that there is a pat­tern for each of us, and that what changes are the details (how we see it “presenting.”)

Because our minds are look­ing for com­plex­ity (as opposed to Sim­ple Pres­ence,) we resist the idea that the “many, many” issues we think we have are usu­ally the same issue, in dif­fer­ent guises.

My favourite way of say­ing this is, “Baskin Rob­bins has 32 flavours, and they are all Ice Cream.”

I sus­pect my pri­mary issue is that I end­lessly choose to cre­ate a sense of dis-satisfaction, as in “never sat­is­fied.” The Buddha’s First Noble Truth is that “Life is suf­fer­ing.” The word trans­lated ‘suf­fer­ing’ is [tag]dukkha[/tag], which is a San­skrit word mean­ing ‘unsat­is­fac­tori­ness.’ When you trans­late the state­ment as, “Life is unsat­is­fac­tori­ness,” you see that the con­cept flows both ways.

On the one hand , we could read that life is unsat­is­fac­tory, in its intrin­sic nature. In other words, the nature of life is to suf­fer. On the other hand, we could look at the sen­tence and think, “I suf­fer because of how I approach life, because life itself is neutral.”

In any event, my sense of what I do, (and I sus­pect you might do this too, in your own way,) is to set my inter­nal ther­mo­stat for ‘how I am sup­posed to be feel­ing.’ I say that I set my ther­mo­stat because it’s not a per­ma­nent set­ting. I cer­tainly have, for peri­ods, re-set it dif­fer­ently. My nature, though, is to think that feel­ing sad or morose is nor­mal, and that extremes in either direc­tion are aberrations.

What hap­pened the par­tic­u­lar week­end I’m think­ing of was that Dar­bella was won­der­ing aloud about our retire­ment adven­ture in Costa Rica. She really, really wants to go now, and that is not hap­pen­ing. I lis­tened to her talk about her imag­in­ings about the future, and ini­tially I main­tained my per­spec­tive. (My per­spec­tive is that the future is not here, and wor­ry­ing about it is actu­ally wor­ry­ing about a fig­ment of our imag­i­na­tion. Bet­ter to deal with now, which is actu­ally here.) I encour­aged her to talk, and to dis­cuss what, if any­thing, we could do right now.

So far, all well and good. Then, my ‘lit­tle voice’ kicked in. “Wayne, this is your fault. You should work harder. You should make this hap­pen. Get a job. No one likes you any­way.” I felt my ‘self’ slide down an old and famil­iar ‘slide.’

I made myself quite mis­er­able. We decided to go for a drive to check out the loca­tion of a restau­rant we have been mean­ing to try. The town is a lovely place, right on the Grand River, and is the town where my first train­ing place­ment was as I stud­ied to be a ther­a­pist, back in 1981–82.

We sat in a cof­fee shop, on a beau­ti­ful spring day, over­look­ing the mighty Grand, sip­ping lattes. Dar­bella talked some more about buy­ing a hotel in Costa Rica. She asked me how I was doing. I told her. And I really milked it. How I never assumed, in 1981, I would be where I was today, woe is me, and how the mis­er­able state of the Uni­verse was all my fault. I won’t bore you with the details, but as usual I ended by declar­ing that I was going to stop writ­ing, close shop, and go live under a bridge.

Dar sat and lis­tened. And gave me a hug.

Now, I use this illus­tra­tion to indi­cate that this is my pat­tern for mak­ing me mis­er­able. This time, the osten­si­ble topic was money, hotels, tim­ing and Costa Rica, but it could have just as eas­ily been about client num­bers, pub­lish­ing, or what­ever. This is what I do—I take what­ever is presently going on and apply my pat­tern to it, and thus cre­ate the very famil­iar feel­ing of ‘unsat­is­fac­tori­ness’ for myself.

The place where all of this can really go off the rails is if I allow myself to think that any of the things I am ‘say­ing’ to myself are either ‘real’ or ‘true.’ The impor­tant part of learn­ing to live in the present is to rec­og­nize that the game I was play­ing in my head is my real­ity, and my ‘present.’ Not the details. The game.

What I mean is that the only sig­nif­i­cant thing going on was that I was telling myself the sto­ries I knew would fuel my efforts to cre­ate the most mis­ery for myself. It was essen­tial, then, that I be will­ing to share what I was doing with someone—and that some­one, usu­ally, is Dar­bella. Not to get her to ‘fix me’ (she can’t) or to make it all go away (she can’t and there is noth­ing hap­pen­ing right now that needs to go away—it’s all a fig­ment of my imag­i­na­tion.) My job, using total hon­esty as the guid­ing prin­ci­ple, was to share with Dar what I was telling myself.

Now, if you are into pro­tect­ing your ego and act­ing all wise and stuff, this will be dif­fi­cult. I am not, obvi­ously, as I am writ­ing about this here. I admit freely that I am quite good at tor­tur­ing myself. I am also quite good at let­ting go and get­ting back to a ‘sat­is­fac­tory reality.’

The key exer­cise here is to con­tinue to com­mu­ni­cate in the ‘here and now’ even when my ‘here and now’ is focussed on the sto­ries in my head, which are about past and future. As I share my crazy-making inter­nal the­atre in the ‘here and now’, as opposed to clam­ming up or look­ing for some­one to blame, the edge comes off the stuff I am telling myself.

Dar­bella and I have learned to lis­ten to each other with lit­tle judge­ment and no need to rush in and fix. I do not scare myself over Dar’s stuff, and so far, she hasn’t scared her­self over mine. This is a learned skill—sitting with another with­out judge­ment or the need to res­cue. We prac­tice this all the time.

Do I still want to res­cue? Of course! I love Dar, and do not like see­ing her hurt­ing. I rec­og­nize, how­ever, that there is noth­ing I can do, inside of her head. And vice versa. I do what I do inside of me, and I will only stop ‘unsatisfactoriness-making’ when I choose to stop. And then, I will do it again.

I remem­ber work­ing with a client, who, in eight weeks, made great progress. She ter­mi­nated ther­apy. Six months later she called, to book an appoint­ment, and let me know she was really mad at me. When I asked her why, she said, “Because my prob­lem is back! You didn’t fix me!” I laughed.

Her appoint­ment was a time for her to vent, and for me to help her to look at how life really is. She had learned some skills, last time around, for deal­ing with her issue. She applied the skills, and she stopped tor­tur­ing her­self. After six months, some­thing shifted, or she relaxed her vigil, and her pat­tern re-emerged. She thought ‘it’ had left, but in real­ity, she does not have an ‘it.’ There is, always and ever, only she and her choices.

The prac­tice part is, ‘prac­tice until you die.’ There is no cure for how we abuse our­selves (other than death, which finally shuts us up…)—there is only notic­ing and shift­ing how we act.

Have a look at ‘all’ of your issues, and see if there is not an under­ly­ing theme of ‘unsatisfactoriness-making’ going on (hint: there is!) Notice all of your self-justifications, the blam­ing, and the fin­ger pointing.

Then, have a breath, and remind your­self that all of this is noth­ing more than the game you are play­ing in your head. Your real­ity is your real­ity, until it isn’t.

Hold your­self and your inter­nal processes gen­tly. Find some­one with whom to share your games and dra­mas. Let him or her know that you do not expect them to ‘fix’ you, as you are not bro­ken. Be hon­est. Be brave. Let go. And be gen­tle when you do your pat­tern to your­self, all over again.